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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'm ready to call it now - preference cascade.
NYT publishing this article mere days after the abject failure of trans activists to organize a high-profile boycott is incredibly telling. And there's been lots of signs that public opinion (especially elite public opinion) has been getting brittle on the issue - no one likes getting bulled by moralists all the time, especially when they're your distant social lessers. Moreover, this isn't a dramatic turnabout & could get accepted fairly quickly by the laypeople - I had a leftist freind tell me umsolicited that they were sick of 'purity politics' on the left (though I checked, they didnt consider JKR cancellation to be an ecample - yet)
Cynical take 1- JKR got fed up & hired a big money PR firm. Possibly quite some time ago, with them waiting for (engineering?) a time and place to strike back. Her upcoming podcast series with the WBC escapee lady fits this theory nicely.
Cynical take 2 - Alternately, the powers that be decided that the TERF wars were sucking up too much oxygen & that it is now time for 'healing & reconciliation' and a renewed focus on squashing down the populist right. Which I've argued for before - right now is the worst possible time for leftist doctrinal infighting, their position is overextended and their enemy is visibly regrouping.
It is fascinating how, once the "if you buy this game, or play this game, or even look in the direction of this game, you are literally funding Rowling's literal campaign of literal genocide!" campaign failed, they immediately pivoted to "She's an anti-Semite, you know" with the goblins and the shofar and the anti-Semitic cheese.
No stick is too bad to beat the dog, as the saying goes.
Based on my limited googling and eyesight, best I can tell there are zero similarities between the goblin horn in the game and a shofar. Am I tripping? Is there any way in which that horn is a shofar that wouldnt also apply to the Horn of Gondor? I am genuinely curious, since to me it looks like "generic fantasy horn", which I understand a shofar very much *isn't *, but I've been seeing it repeated from people who I'd usually trust to know this sort of thing. Or maybe they haven't seen the one in game, and are just repeating the party line.
Yes. I'm seeing it repeated online too, just parroting the party line. Because you don't want to be labelled as an anti-Semite, now do you? So agree with what your betters tell you and pass it along. It's very hard to be charitable when discussing this, since it's a bunch of loudmouth and possibly mentally-impaired people donning their tinfoil hats (how obsessed do you have to be to dig down into whether or not a particular type of cheese is kosher? and then tout that online as evidence of the Big Anti-Jewish Dogwhistle Conspiracy?) and spreading misinformation, which the retweeters then swallow as totally true (since questioning only gets a target painted on your back) and spread themselves, and then people go "it has been proven she's a bad person" because they saw something someone had passed on at fourth-hand about it, and if it's on the Internet, it must be correct!
Five seconds' Googling will get you to an article about blowing horns. Is the Basque horn in the photo like a shofar or not? Are the Basques being anti-Semitic by using copies of shofars, since only the Jews ever invented using animal horns (sarcasm off)?
What I think: entirely possible the art department for the game used reference photos of shofars as the basis for the drawing of the goblin horn and indeed they might have picked it not to look like things like the Horn of Gondor because copyright infringement is a pain in the behind and studios have entire fleets of lawyers on stand-by for any perceived "whoa you copied our trademarked visuals, pay up" cases; 1612 is a year of English witch trials which fits in with the lore of the world
What the "if you don't agree that trans genocide is happening you're a bigot" crowd think: Rowling herself personally designed it to look like a shofar and picked a year of a "Fatmilk" which means "cheese" German revolt which included a pogrom and picked non-kosher cheese to insult the shofar and be an anti-Semitic dog whistle because she is a monster and every penny spent on this game goes to fund death camps for trans people
The thing is, as far as I can tell, it doesn't even resemble a shofar. I have difficulty processing how you could look at that image and think it looks like a shofar, even if youre trying to find the slightest hint of a dogwhistle. It's like if you said that the main character in RDR2 rides a sidesaddle. But thats what i struggle with. I know that a lot of people spread rumours without verifying, but what about the people that have seen both the game horn and a shofar? Is it a gutsy assumption that nobody will call them on something even if it's blatantly apparent that it's false? Is it a deliberate attempt to call a deer a horse, or make people say there are five lights? Or do they honestly, truly, in their heart of hearts believe it? It seems impossible enough that I feel like I have to be missing something, and the two horns really do have more in common than saying that a Cessna is clearly the Red Baron's Fokker Dr.I.
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There is a comment in the linked Reddit thread by someone with relevant experience who says that it is indeed not a Shofar, and also that the "anti-Semitic cheese" thing is also a massive reach (since Kosher cheese basically didn't exist for a long-ass time at all).
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