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Notes -
National feminist organizations break their silence on Amber Heard in an open letter of support
For context: the judgment against Heard - in a trial where I think it's fair to say she suffered greatly in the public eye - was in June. Why come out now?
The line itself is all pretty standard. To stretch my muscles of charity: feminists are concerned that legal barriers and what appears (to them) as "punitive" lawsuits will discourage victims. As is often the case, they choose to emphasize speaking generically about victims rather than actually delve into why so many people and a jury didn't think Heard was a good example of one. Which is not what trials are about.
To me the only interesting thing is...why now? The trial was the talk of the internet for weeks. Why did none of these feminists come out then?
I speculated originally that the news media was deliberately not covering the trial in order to avoid giving Depp - who was clearly benefitting from the PR war - the attention he desired. TBH that delusional idea - that things don't gain attention or legitimacy unless the media "validates" them - is an idea I see around left-leaning spaces a lot.
But this doesn't apply to feminist orgs. And, even if it did, they could have done what the media did and come out right after the trial to do damage control and tut-tut about the "worrying implications" and, of course, the claim that bots and others were manipulating the discussion.
Why on Earth did it take this long? Did they have to spend all that time wrangling these people together and convincing them that the ingroup wouldn't mind? That seems overly optimistic; I imagine their audience made up their mind a while ago.
Amber Heard could be an event that people reference as the failure of [left wing thing], like early GamerGate. So doing all of this is a why to prevent people in the future from remembering the past correctly. More allegations, someone says “well remember amber heard?”, mods ban them for misinformation and point them to a doctored Wikipedia page and they’re left scratch their head. As the most televised trial, it will be in history books too, which can now be dr’d
The Wikipedia page doesn't even have to be doctored. Wikipedia's standards on truth and facts are so horrible that they openly admit that they don't publish truth, they publish consensus. Basically you should never trust Wikipedia on anything and you should always double-check an article against actually reliable sources.
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