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Notes -
Harry Potter and the Vibe Shift
I actually was thinking about giving this topic a rest - it makes me feel like I'm being radicalized in slow motion - but...just when I thought I was out...some room for optimism: NY Times: In Defense of J.K. Rowling
To give a brief rundown of the situation:
NYTimes employees in conjunction with GLAAD released a letter putting pressure on the NYTimes for reporting in a "biased" fashion on trans issues recently and how it's being used by states to pass bills against gender medicine.
The NYT...actually shows some spine and refuses to bend, saying: “...But at the same time, we recognize that GLAAD’s advocacy mission and The Times’s journalistic mission are different.". Who would have thought that we'd get to the point where a basic recognition of the different role of activists and journalists would be noteworthy?
Apparently the NYT also posted an internal memo warning NYT staffers against public working with an activist organization against their own company stating that they: "will not tolerate, participation by Times journalists in protests organized by advocacy groups or attacks on colleagues on social media and other public forums."
Then, we see what the bruhaha was likely about and what the open letter was trying to preempt: we get the above op-ed yesterday, basically defending JKR against the criticism she faced - ahead of the release of The Witch Trials of JKR by Megan Phelps-Roper, an escapee from the Westboro Baptist Church.
In essence: the same strategy we've seen from wreckers and ideologues time after time played out, but the Times did the bare minimum and acted like adults. At a certain point - just as with wreckers like Felicia Somnez at WaPo - I suppose it simply became too much for too little gain. The constant fitna was fine when it was in service of popular causes with little cost, but now seems to be in service of a cause that is dragging many people down. So why not put out the op-ed, while also keeping the workers in line?
Said article's content?
...
Nothing here is new to anyone who spent any time checking on the actual words of JKR and her defenders. But it is interesting to see the NYT posting about it and fighting the pushback, especially as it follows the incredible failure of the Hogwarts: Legacy boycott and Sturgeon's fall from power*
The backlash can no longer be written off as the cultural peculiarity of "TERF Island" - a desperate rhetorical ploy used by activists to distract the blind. It's not just a European thing. It's everywhere.
My personal take was that transactivism was just the next, inevitable step in the march to atomization in liberalism. And it probably still is. But there may be bridges too far, even for liberals. I hope.
A good note to leave the trans issue on for at least a while and reset my brain before I become some sort of schizo, hyper-reactionary monarchist or something. Maybe go play a few new games...
* It's been a great month for her, after years of shit, I have to say.
I want to point out the cynical case- trans activists are terrible allies and abandoning them could easily be the woke coalition telling its most difficult members to know their place, not the decline of woke.
Trans activists are demanding, high drama, unsympathetic(at a basic level, they’re mentally ill people who look like either very ugly women or very weak men, which is not a very high status thing to be or something that finds it easy to garner sympathy), have no real message discipline, and tend to overextend themselves picking fights that they then expect to be bailed out of. ‘Teaching these people to be team players’ could very well take the form of letting them lose a few battles and telling them to deal with it.
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion. What I take to be your substantive point (progressives may simply be giving their least-popular allies a strategic time-out) is surely worth consideration, but making a laundry list of negative stereotypes about your outgroup still isn't allowed here.
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I was thinking about this the other day. "High drama" is a descriptive that fits most of the progressive Left's current "intersectional" favorites. While the left of my youth used to be represented in the US by the likes of Ralph Nader and Noam Chomsky, who conformed to The Motte's rules of discourse as naturally as right-wingers like William F. Buckley -- politics was very much like parents having a tense but polite discussion -- the last 10-15 years has seen the left's energy usurped by young gay-adjacent easily triggered women and minorities, which is a coalition of high drama 24/7. The right, starting with Trump, is certainly attempting to match them. That's why the culture war has erupted from the relatively staid discourse of the 1990s-2000s to the Clown World: The Musical show were are getting now, and why Trans activists were able to slip right in without tripping many center-left normy alarms. The volume was already turned up to their level.
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