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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25298 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 1, 2024

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They can't really attack her for being a right wing extremist when her world famous books are a pretty clear allegory of Racism Bad.

As the TERF controversies showed, agreeing with right wing extremists on Current Year issues is enough to be judged guilty by association. For example, Julie Bindel is far to the left of almost all of her critics, on most issues. Controversies-of-the-day create weird alliances: think of Christopher Hitchens and neoconservatives on the Iraq War.

They can't really attack her for being a right wing extremist when her world famous books are a pretty clear allegory of Racism Bad.

The crazies are getting around that one by saying she's really a racist and an anti-Semite. Because the goblin bankers are meant to be Jewish, you see. Plus other offences. She's pro-slavery, because SPEW in the books gets mocked by the other kids, including Harry, so that means Rowling thinks slavery is okay.

The pro-trans to the point of being driven insane by it lot really, really want her to go to prison, if not worse. Felker-Martin is just an opportunist, but there really are people frothing at the mouth about Rowling online.

The crazies are getting around that one by saying she's really a racist and an anti-Semite. Because the goblin bankers are meant to be Jewish, you see.

The opportunism of this claim is quite ironic, considering most of these people are probably also enthusiastically cheerleading for Hamas in their quest to murder every Jew in the middle east.

As the TERF controversies showed, agreeing with right wing extremists on Current Year issues is enough to be judged guilty by association.

Yes, judged by a small number of extremists. Not so much by the average person. JK Rowling is much too popular to get canceled for anything she could say short of literally praising Adolf Hitler, and even then she would still have a bunch of fans. Trying to cancel her would be like trying to take down Godzilla with a handgun.

The attempt to have the Hogwarts Legacy game cancelled was game, but futile, and vastly amusing, as was the back-pedalling afterwards about "well it was never about having the game not sell, it was all about raising awareness of the evil of Rowling's anti-trans genocide calls".

True, but that's the audience to whom attackers of J. K. Rowling are appealing. In the long run, small groups of politics-obsessed extremists can have a huge impact; just compare the changes on trans issues in the past 20 years.

They certainly might have a huge impact in other ways, but I think it's not going to be by making JK Rowling herself unpopular. She is at the level of celebrity and wealth where few things short of her killing a person or having sex with kids on video could actually take her down in any real way.

She has enough fuck-you money that she can shrug off all these attempts to get her, and I think the attempts to doxx her just made her go "To hell with it" and come out swinging on Twitter/X and elsewhere. No point in trying to be "let's see this from both sides" when one side wants to do its best (not very much of a best, admittedly) to destroy you.

The problem is for the authors who aren't at that level of "I cry myself to sleep on a bed of hundred pound notes every night" as we saw with YA kerfuffles over similar topics. Those are the people very vulnerable to a small but loud online clique complaining to your publisher about why they didn't use sensitivity readers for your problematic manuscript.

I think "normal" people don't get how deranged this debate can get online.

That might actually help along the swiftboating: surely no one would attack JKR in this insane way if she wasn't really a Holocaust denier (yes, that was recently a thing)/racist/person who thinks all trans are rapists right?

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