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The Sidney Sweeney commercial.
AKA, why nutpicking is not a valid defense. And probably hasn't been in a while.
The Sidney Sweeny "Good Jeans" commercial has gone viral as many here probably know. Of course, with a commercial featuring a conventionally attractive white woman making a double entendre about how she is hot and wears cool pants was sure to be. But, perhaps more than the merits of the original commercial, the backlash to the commercial has vaulted it into an even higher tier of virility than even the most optimistic American Eagle marketers could have projected.
Of course, it is being called fascist, eugenicist, white supremacist, dog-whistling, etc. So, just about everything normally happening on the internet. Right? Well, sure there is your token tic tok users making such accusations. The usual suspects like Salon.com immediately seized upon this narrative, along with someone who is apparently famous called Doja Cat. And MSNBC to complete the set of entities that pick up anything they can regarding online outrage.
But it doesn't stop there, what one would call mainstream, respectable, left of center publications went with it. The Times, Post, and ABC all threw their hats in the outrage ring. ABC especially went deep with Good Morning America bringing on an "expert" to rail against the ad as "Nazi Propaganda" (the host's words), "The American Eugenics Movement" and "White Supremacism" (the expert's words).
Where does this leave us? For me its another data point that the accusation of "nutpicking" whenever one of these woke controversies emerges is kinda a bad faith argument to make. People who see these things aren't nutpicking, they are being presented with a lot of nuts, often in prominent positions or positions of power. This particular controversy had me feeling sympathetic cringe on behalf of the reasonable center-leftists. But then I fisk that feeling and have to ask when they are actually going to police their crazies the way the right's mainstream does. Candace Owens employment status at the Daily Wire is terminated. Tucker Carlson's status at Fox is terminated. The guys who got fired at NPR and the NYT? For NPR its the guy who was saying they were too biased towards the left. For the Times, its the guys who let a Senator write a fairly bland Op-Ed about how to police riots.
As for the politicians, most have seemingly stayed away. I doubt many will answer any questions on this directly (Democrats I mean, obviously many Republicans have already made hay with yet another unforced error by the left's activist class). The reason is clear, they know the right answer, particularly for most general elections, is to laugh at the activists and "nuts" on things like this. But they cannot actually seem to bring themselves to actually express that in public. The nuts are their staffers and their boots on the ground and so it seems keeping them happy is more important than being able to say, "sometimes its just a cute girl making a pun". I don't know what the math on this actually is, but there it is. You are what you do, and this is no longer nutpicking, its mainstream. I dont know if nutpicking was ever valid, but I don't think it can reasonably be said to still be so for this category of things.
Unrelated, and yet somehow related: board game publisher CGE criticized for publishing a Harry Potter themed board game.
Specifically, some (though by no means all) well known game reviewers have declared they will stop publishing reviews of any CGE game, as a result of CGE publishing a Harry Potter themed version of "Codenames." This, on grounds that Rowling uses her money to
The organization in question, of course, does not phrase it that way, claiming instead to
In other words, Rowling says "I want to protect specifically female rights." Her critics must regard the protection of female rights as logically equivalent to transphobia; certainly they treat the statements as logically equivalent. This seems like a mistake to me; it seems to me pretty easy to imagine a society that both protects uniquely female rights and spaces and grants total legal protection and even subsidies to the gender nonconforming (indeed--for the most part, in practical terms we in the United States appear to live in approximately that society now).
CGE did publish a bit of an open-ended maybe-apology? The Bluesky userbase (should they rebrand as Bluehair?) seems about as mollified by that as the redditors in /r/boardgames, which is to say, not very. In fact the reddit thread is the first time I've actually encountered "no ethical consumption under capitalism" deployed unironically in the wild, to explain why it's cool to definitely not boycott major companies like HBO, or Lego, or Visa/Mastercard, etc. over Rowling connections, while insisting that it is a moral imperative to destroy this particular brand in response to a business connection to a woman who has dedicated her wealth to fighting for women's rights.
Now, @FtttG suggests below,
Fair enough, and the mainstream fandom of Harry Potter is clearly large enough that the game will sell well. But the board game community is often rather short on normies, and for some reason also quite high on drama, with "boycott this publisher" being a somewhat common refrain.
A Harry Potter boardgame is small potatoes compared to the Sweeney thing, but I offer it for comparison. It never fails to astonish me, the vitriol and frankly falsehood leveled against Rowling on this matter. Rowling is very much not anti-trans. She's totally down with people dressing, speaking, and acting however they want, to a degree that no sex or gender conservative would ever approve. All she wants is for sex-segregated women's spaces (restrooms, prisons, changing rooms, shelters) to remain sex-segregated for all the safety and comfort reasons that have always underwritten that segregation. This seems like a pretty minor heresy, given the larger Leftism to which she unquestionably subscribes.
But of course, it's often Freud's narcissism of small differences that really underwrites "outgroup" identification. And since Rowling is financially and culturally insulated from direct attack, it is only her smallest, most vulnerable business partners who get targeted by her critics. "No ethical consumption under capitalism" becomes the excuse for picking-and-choosing popular outrage for maximum strategic benefit. There's less friction to identifying with a viral movement if doing so bears only the strictly social cost of alienating anyone who disagrees. For the movement, alienating your friends and family who don't fall in line is a feature rather than a bug.
This is where I want to push back (only a little) on @FtttG's response. The Sweeney thing is just one especially notable case among many. Calls to boycott or "show the door" this or that person or product are a dime a dozen, a standard play in the political playbook. But every single one is both a trial balloon and a substantive nudge. The tide is not completely unrelenting, and has receded somewhat since Trump's re-election, but here we have a couple of stray waves lapping the shore, outrage peddlers beginning to nibble at the edges...
I see your point. In my defense, when I use a word like "normie", I am certainly not thinking of board game fans or hardcore Harry Potter enthusiasts. Many moons ago I was part of a friend group with whom I'd meet up and play board and TTRPG games, a group which included (pseudonyms obviously):
Most of whom were, if not Extremely, then certainly Very Online. If such a composition is in any way representative of the broader board game/TTRPG enthusiast community, at a glance we can see they are a highly selected subculture with values and expectations very different from the mainstream - "bisexual trans person who owns a twelve-sided die and knows what Chaotic Neutral means" is not my idea of a "normie". I've no doubt that wokeness is still ascendant therein and that one could face cancellation for neglecting to mouth woke platitudes in the board gaming community (likewise in video game design, YA literature, knitting circles etc.). But there was a period in the 2010s (peaking in summer 2020) where it really looked like the social rules governing those intensely woke subcultures had a good chance of becoming the social rules governing every Anglophone community (explicitly conservative subcultures like churches and gun clubs excepted). And based on the reaction to this ad, I do think that specific cultural moment has decisively passed. Mainstream spaces are no longer obligatorily woke; caveat emptor for subcultures, many of which are just as woke as ever (if not more so, in light of evaporative cooling).
In the Anglophone world, the "racial reckoning" of 2020 was so widespread and omnipresent that even numerous people who had been thitherto wholly ignorant of politics (esp. identity politics) got swept up in it: everyone was expected to post black squares on Instagram. I feel confident that a plurality of Americans would know who George Floyd is and what he's "famous" for; even though I'd say a plurality of Americans would know what Harry Potter is, I don't know if JK Rowling herself would have quite that level of name recognition, and even of those people who do know who she is, I assume she's known as the creator of Harry Potter first and for her political opinions a distant second, if at all. In point of fact, we already sort of knew that the "JK Rowling is a bigoted genocidal TERF, don't offer her any financial support" thing didn't really have teeth, outside of TRA and nerd circles: despite an attempted boycott mentioned prominently in its Wikipedia lede (which also goes out of its way to smear Rowling as an antisemite), Hogwarts Legacy was the best-selling video game of 2023 and has grossed over $1 billion in revenue. I very much doubt that this is a "knowingly buying Hogwarts Legacy to own the libs" situation: I suspect that the overwhelmingly majority of people who bought a copy of the game were wholly unaware that any attempted boycott even existed. If they had been told that there had been an attempted boycotting, I imagine a significant number would have assumed that it had been organised by the religious right, in protest of the Harry Potter franchise promoting witchcraft - they literally aren't aware of the "JK Rowling is a TERF" meme. When I talk about "normies", that's who I'm talking about.
The big mistake was announcing it on bluesky, the home of these sorts. Why would you do that? Announce it on twitter or tiktok or youtube or wherever normal people are.
You'd be surprised at how many people think that having an X account means you're financially supporting Nazism via ad revenue.
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That's not the point, right? She thinks it's a bad thing that young women are transitioning in larger numbers:
She believes that women can't have penises. She believes trans kids don't exist. She's not anti trans in the sense that she doesn't think that they should be discriminated against, whatever that means, but that's not what anti trans means these days.
Let's look at the quote in context, shall we?
These are all just facts about the way the world is--and the way the world has suddenly changed. Expressing concern about that is not plausibly "anti trans."
Well, adult human females don't have penises, by definition. But the actual link there is to a complaint about the language law enforcement uses in its reporting. This seems relevant to Rowling's interest in protecting women, insofar as that language resulted, in some cases, in male rapists being put into female prisons, which does seem like a pretty terrible idea to me. Does it not seem like a terrible idea to you?
Again, let's check the context of that link....
This gets into some complicated metaphysics, but I'm inclined to agree with Rowling, here, that it doesn't make sense to suggest that a child is ever "born in the wrong body," as if the mind at the body could be so casually separated like that. But if by "anti trans" we just mean "pro Cartesian dualism" or something, then... I'm at a loss. I don't think this is what anyone really means, outside perhaps of a small number of boring philosophers.
Yes. This seems like an open-and-shut case to me, right here: she's not plausibly "anti trans."
Aaaaand here we get to the motte of the argument. What, then, does "anti trans" mean "these days?" Why?
I ask because people are running rampant in the bailey. If all that is meant by "anti trans" is "someone who does not wholeheartedly endorse the reification of gender stereotypes through government imposition of the dubious metaphysics of gender essentialist trends in transsexual political activism" then the term is a deliberate ruse.
Imagine claiming that someone must be anti-Semitic because they do not subscribe to the metaphysical commitments of Judaism. This would clearly be absurd, an abuse of the term in furtherance of some tribal aim. The discourse on transsexuals and the transgendered today is often exactly this absurd, approaching dissent and disagreement with reductionism and ostracism of exactly the kind deployed against Rowling.
Of course it is. Can you imagine if suddenly everyone started dressing in blue and someone writes an article about how concerning it is that young women are dressing in blue en masse? The only people who would care would be those who were against blue.
Defining "woman" as "adult human female" is already the anti trans position, so by (it seems?) implicitly ascribing this definition to Rowling you are proving my point.
It does seem like a terrible idea to me. Did you just assume my
gendermy position on trans issues because I corrected you about Rowling's position on trans issues?It's simple and there's no motte and no bailey and no ruse. Being anti trans is to not believe that trans men are men and trans men are women. This is because the entire trans project is to be treated by society as their target gender, so if you are against that, you are against the whole thing.
I am not aware of anyone laboring under another definition, least of all JK Rowling, who as far as I know, has never claimed to not be "anti trans", but I admit I haven't done a comprehensive survey here.
The difference is that we Jews don't demand that everyone else should subscribe to our metaphysics. Now, Christians do, and while they don't think that someone who doesn't believe in the trinity is anti-Christian, they do believe he is the next best thing.
1 John aside, I would suggest that the standard Christian approach is to distinguish non-Christian from anti-Christian, such that 'non-Christian' means not being within Christianity or disagreeing with Christianity to some extent, and 'anti-Christian' means possessed of specific, active malice towards Christianity.
(If you read all of 1 John, that letter appears to be talking about schisms within a particular community. 1 John 2:18-19 would seem to indicate that the 'many antichrists' are those who 'went out from us'. The 'liars' in 2:22 are presumably then those who were part of the Johannine community but who have since gone around denying the constitutive dogmas of that community.)
This approach seems consistent with how we talk about other religious groups as well. As I am a Christian, I naturally disagree with parts of Judaism and parts of Islam. I sincerely believe that religious Jews and Muslims are, ipso facto, in error about certain facts. This does not make me anti-semitic or anti-Islam/Islamophobic, just as I do not consider those Jews or Muslims to be anti-Christian. We distinguish between disagreement and malice.
The whole criticism of trans activism here is that they are treating disagreement as malice. There's no 'neutral' position. You either affirm the whole platform or you are a transphobe.
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If the proportion of people wearing blue multiplied by an order of magnitude or more virtually overnight, that would be weird to not notice.
If wearing blue also resulted in a lifetime of medicalization, I would like to think people should care!
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At least initially*, she definitely did claim she was not "anti-trans." She repeatedly said she supported trans rights inasmuch as they had a right to be respected and live their lives as they wished and not be harassed or abused. She just didn't think trans women should be treated as actually biologically women, housed with women in women's prisons, young girls should not be encouraged to have mastectomies and put on T, etc.
Yes, that's "anti-trans" by the reductive trans activist perspective that anything less than unconditional validation is anti-trans, but it's not a reasonable definition to anyone else.
It's absolutely crazy-making to me, that people read everything she has written, in which she has laid out her beliefs with care and nuance, and what they come away with is "She's a hateful bigot who wants trans people put in camps."
(Part of the reason it is so crazy-making to me is that I basically share Rowling's views. And yes, there are spaces and social circles where I know I simply cannot say this if I want to maintain those relationships.)
* Admittedly, after years of being dogpiled in public, I think her rhetoric is a bit harsher and more mocking nowadays, but I think she'd still say she believes basically the same thing, that trans women have rights which should be supported, but that doesn't include the right to be treated as a biological woman.
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I think you're making it more complex than it needs to be. The specifics of gender, government imposition, metaphysics, etc. don't matter for the definition of "anti-trans." The only thing that matters is, "disagrees with trans rights activists that I agree with." The fact that, etymologically, "anti-trans" would seem to indicate someone who has antipathy for transgender people or their rights, is useful, but not actually related to the definition of the word, in terms of how it's used in the wild by the types of people who would label people as "anti-trans."
It's akin to how "White Supremacist" might create the image of someone who believes in the supremacy of white people over people of other races in some intrinsic/genetic/moral/etc. way, but, in fact, refers to anyone of any race of any opinion about races, who disagrees with me about how white supremacist modern society is and/or about how/if to tear down modern society for being white supremacist. The negative valence introduced by the etymological components of the term offer value to the term, but not meaning.
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I'm a boardgamer and have to sit on my hands every time this comes up in /r/boardgames or boardgamegeek, because there is basically no tolerance allowed for any dissent. JK Rowling is a transphobic genocidal Jew-hating racist fascist and buying HP content is the equivalent of donating money to fund concentration camps.
I wish that was hyperbole. I wish I was exaggerating. That is literally what they think, and any pushback will get you banned fairly quickly.
It is pretty well-contained on Boardgamegeek. I avoid the political boards, and find less politics on the rest of the 'Geek than I do almost anywhere else. I recently read the CGE-bashing threads on Rainbow Gaming because they stopped doing guided tours of the Bedlam mental hospital 100 years ago, but the mods are good at keeping the board gaming forum and the mental hospital separate.
The culture that is Boardgamegeek needs to keep politics out of the main boards because there are a lot of conservative-leaning groups in board gaming - you have the grognards, a lot of Zoomer barstool conservatives, and the Mormons (The LDS Church encourage board gaming as a morally healthy way of keeping kids off screens). At the very least you need to grognards and the People of Hair Colour on the same forum in order to be the go-to place to advertise the big miniatures-based Kickstarters.
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If I wish for any supper power, being able to make the nightmares of too wind up people true is up there in the list with immortality
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Wait where did the Jew hating come from?
Aside from the goblins there was also an effort last year to label her a "Holocaust denier" for denying that the Nazis specifically targeted transgender people. "Holocaust denial" and "Nazi apologia" are anti-semitic, so she's anti-semitic. Here is an article from the time arguing the pro-Rowling side.
I think this segment is worth highlighting. It illustrates Rowling's point (Nazis were targetting LGB, not T) in a very darkly comedic way.
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People claim that goblins in Harry Potter are an anti-Semitic caricature. Personally, I believe that if one looks at a fantasy race of bankers and their first thought is "they're Jews", that says more about them than it does about the author.
Heck, I've seen people claim that the (decidedly non-mercantile) goblins in Goblin Slayer are an intentional anti-Semitic caricature; on the grounds that (paraphrasing from memory) 'goblins are always, and have always been, nothing but an anti-Semitic caricature — that's why they're depicted with long noses.' (Still not quite as ridiculous a take as the 20-something who complained about "anti-Semitic microaggressions" in a Mel Brooks movie.)
Is that more or less ridiculous a take than the people who complained that Blazing Saddles was racist?
I'd say only slightly more. The people who complain about Blazing Saddles are generally the sort who can't grasp the use/mention distinction, and also often the sort to argue that certain very bad things should not be depicted in fiction even to condemn them, like the nerd forum (I can't remember which one) that was considering banning any and all mention or discussion of Chainsaw Man, because it depictsMakima's grooming of Denji , even if it also shows it as quite clearly a bad thing.
Meanwhile, the person complaining about the "Druish Princess" joke in Spaceballs also thought Brooks's Yiddish accent as Yogurt was Italian, because it's one of those "white ethnic" accents you hear in NYC, right? And "Brooks" isn't the most Jewish-sounding surname, is it? So expecting her to know he's Jewish — and thus the joke is "classic Jewish self-deprecating humor" instead of an "antisemitic microaggression" — is totally unreasonable, and you know what the only kind of non-Jew who bothers to learn and remember who is or isn't Jewish is….
(Now ask me about the "naked Orientalist racism" in Batman comics…)
You can't just tease me like that. Go on...
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Everyone knows (I say jokingly) that it's actually that JK Rowling expressed a bit of subtlety and restraint by not outright referring to them as gnomes instead.
I have seen people claim it's because the illustrations (which she approved) look like stereotypes of anti-Jewish propaganda (due largely to the noses), but I haven't done the comparisons myself.
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The goblins are allegedly Jewish caricatures. A lot of the bits of evidence that are brought up - like a Star of David on the floor of Gringotts - are either coincidences or issues caused by the adaptation (the location they were filming in had them already).
On the other hand, they do run the banks, hounded at least one person in canon over debts and do have a different understanding of property (anything wrought by goblins is seen as only leased for the lifetime of the wizard who bought it which...you can see how that could lead to misunderstandings) that leads to at least one goblin betraying the team for treasure.
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There are people that believe that the goblins in the world of Harry Potter are a (racist) reference to Jews.
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Supposedly the goblins who run Gringotts bank are reminiscent of antisemitic stereotypes. Your mileage may vary, I don't really see it.
Even if the accusation was well-founded, I imagine the Venn diagram of "people calling for JK Rowling's death" and "people enthusiastically celebrating the massacre of unarmed Israelis on October 7th" would show a great deal of overlap. Very few trans activists accusing JK Rowling of antisemitism actually care about antisemitism qua antisemitism: they just hate her because of her gender-critical opinions and are trying to tar her with as many other brushes as are available. See also the rather contrived accusations of Sino- and Hiberno-phobia.
(As an aside, there is at least one character who is canonically Jewish, a heroic Ravenclaw.)
Hiberno-phobia? I can only remember one Irish character, and I don't remember them being portrayed particularly badly (apart from being bad at quidditch).
Séamus Finnegan. I recently heard someone arguing in earnest that his name is a "reverse spoonerism" for Sinn Féin (I'm sorry, what?), and the running gag in the first book/movie of him accidentally causing small explosions is meant to make the reader think of the IRA.
I'm an Irish man who grew up when the Harry Potter books were all the rage. My friends and family literally queued up to buy them on publication day and devoured them over the course of a weekend. I don't recall ever hearing an Irish person contemporaneously suggesting that Séamus was a negative stereotype.
I actually really like that theory. It's so obscure as to be pretty clearly false but would be a hoot to advocates for at dinner parties.
Well, the names of Harry's mentors are references to esoteric alchemical processes, so it's not the craziest fan theory I've ever heard.
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I mean, the HP world is pretty quaintly simple in a '50s-cartoon way, and in fact everything non-British (the French (of course), the Bulgarians, ...) in it is presented as the sort of droll stereotype you would expect from old monolingual British people who have never really left the country except perhaps to go and be drunken pests on Tenerife or the like. This does not really register as malicious, as much as it is just ignorant and provincial. I find myself drawn to the charitable(?) explanation that many of the activists themselves are rather ignorant and provincial, and quite self-conscious about it in the modern instagrammable world of jetsetting global citizen cultural trivia mongery, and it's well known that humans are particularly cruel towards displays of identity markers in others that they are desperate to shake off themselves (hence all the older children hating on childish things, Indians hating on "pajeets", people in a hierarchy hating on people one step down in the hierarchy).
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Yeah, I love playing board games but I hate (and have completely disconnected myself from) the board gaming community. I got sick and tired of political fights constantly being started over games, proclamations that something was evil for various reasons (racist, etc) and just general priggishness. It seeps into the games some too, though it is lower intensity and thus more tolerable (for example, Dominion 2e going out of its way to change all cards from saying "he" to "he/she", or Wingspan removing reference to a bird named after Hitler). Like @WhiningCoil, I'm pretty annoyed that a bunch of self righteous jerks have trampled all over my fun hobby because they refuse to just let it be fun, it has to be a political enterprise.
Which bird is that?
Sorry, it wasn't Hitler. When I went digging I found that my memory got that mixed up, but they did rename various birds which were named after humans: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/3182394/american-birds-to-be-renamed
In that thread, the president of the game's publisher says "I wouldn't call this... a matter of erasing the past--the past isn't changing. Rather, it's using the information we have in the present to not celebrate or honor those who committed atrocious acts in the past and to simply not be derogatory to certain cultures". So, pretty explicitly letting politics drive game design, even with the fig leaf of "we're just keeping pace with the names used by official ornithological groups".
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To apply some boardgaming lingo, here, this strikes me as a good example of how the American culture wars are being waged asymmetrically. (As is so often the case, Scott Alexander noticed years ago.) Although I don't actually know of any, I'm sure there are places on the Internet where (say) criticism of Donald Trump will get you banned--but they are explicitly "right wing" spaces. Whereas places you might naturally suspect to be politically neutral--hobby websites, for example!--are routinely very much not. BoardGameGeek and NexusMods are the two hobby sites that I know technically "ban" politics, but apply that ban selectively in exactly the way "Conservative Versus Neutral" implies. Reddit has a site-wide rule against calls for violence and often bans accounts for using certain right-coded no-no words, but I don't think a day goes by that I don't see at least one comment calling for the literal extermination of Trump voters, conservatives, etc. Is that nut-picking? Maybe! But if so, there are an awful lot of nuts to pick, and no one in my outgroup suggesting they chill. (And probably some of those posters are AI/actual Chinese psyops, but still.)
Having Trump in office hasn't really changed this, though it has perhaps limited some of the more egregious examples in the federal bureaucracy, higher education, and corporate world. The "alt right" inverts left wing identitarianism and adopts some of its methods, but they don't noticeably control a bunch of putatively "neutral" spaces. Politics moves in cycles, and eventually the Republicans will be the minority party again. If Sweeney and CGE is what we get when Republicans have control of the federal government, what can we expect when that changes? I do not think "a cooling off of the culture wars" is on the Democratic agenda!
That's partly a consequence of the people who make up the groups. Board games nowadays are primarily played by younger, indoorsy people. That's generally going to be left-leaning people. If you started a club for gun enthusiasts, I doubt progressives are going to invade the space and push out the people who refuse to use someone's preferred pronouns. And your gun club is probably going to have the occasional comment about Democrats that would start a fight should any Democrat be around to hear it.
But there tends to be a certain creeping nature to it. You're making a wargame forum and someone wants to show off their mechs in pride colors. You either ban it or leave it. Then if you ban it you're a political space but according to the left not a political space if you allow it. If you allow it someone is going to give a negative response that probably leads to an argument. The next time someone shows off their mechs and adds "trans rights are human rights" and we repeat.
To my understanding the Battletech forum rejected pride mechs. And one of the novel authors made some gay characters and that got rejected. Eventually Reddit intervened to replace the mods and the left quite literally took over the space.
No one can without trampling on the First Amendment. And they certainly aren't going to choose to stop being angry that Trump managed to win again.
I think that answer only kicks the can down the road. I agree that we naïvely expect young, bookish people to lean left rather than right - but why is that the case?
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Well put. The bias in "neutral" spaces is something I've unsuccessfully argued with the common redditor and open leftists about for years at this point. Trying to focus in on this issue by having your average left-of-center person acknowledge it in these discussions is virtually impossible. The most condensed and easily deliverable version of this argument that I've come across is to present to people the Ad Fontes Media Bias Chart. If they're the average dug-in redditor, they'll either claim the site itself is biased and unreliable or they'll pivot and say something like, "Left leaning views are just more inline with reality," and the discussion/argument is essentially over at that point. It's the same tactics over and over. They'll either grasp at something to discredit the source or demand you endlessly provide additional sources to corroborate it, or they'll implicitly admit to the bias and justify why it is this way, all while never actually admitting that it is.
It's like the scale of it is so large and ubiquitous that it's nearly impossible to recognize for some people, and for others it's The Celebration Parallax: That’s Not Happening and It’s Good That It Is.
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Post TDS content on say, a hunting forum or a boating forum.
What's TDS?
Trump derangement syndrome
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Trump Derangement Syndrome.
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This one really broke my heart. I'd been pulling away from the boardgame community for years and years at this point. I get maybe one new game a year, I listen to a single board gaming podcast more because I like their banter than anything. I no longer visit any boardgaming website because they are all so overrun with activism. And sadly, that single podcast I listen announced they were severing their relationship with CGE after being sponsored by them over this Harry Potter incident.
I'm just so profoundly exhausted by it all. Why do these people have to make it so fucking hard to just enjoy things?
The side that wants to win always beats the side that wants to be left alone; grilling is a coup-complete problem.
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I've seen it described as gang tags, basically: if you can tag (or in this case, say) "Sharks Suck!" and make it clear it's a hostile environment to anyone saying "Jets Suck" or "Sharks Rule", well, it's demonstrably your space now.
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