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J. K. Rowling challenges new Scottish hate speech legislation, openly challenging them to arrest her for calling trans criminals men who pretend to be women:
https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1774747068944265615
#ArrestMe is, dare I say it, brave and powerful. At least she's putting skin in the game. It's also pretty well calculated in my opinion.
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. She even makes sure to target India Willoughby, who is apparently anti-black. Rowling has an enormous pot of money for expensive litigation and automatic worldwide attention on her. It's hard to righteously defend people such as
It's very practical politics to fish out the worst of the enemy milieu to preface one's normative statements. I think Rowling has a good shot at tactical victory - either the govt won't charge her or she'll win in court. On the other hand, only systemic change is going to change the progressive-leaning status quo. You need an Orban or some similar force to drag out the weed by the roots, rather than just pruning away when it grows particularly egregious. Rowling is no Orban, that's probably far too extreme for her.
The legislation is here: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/asp/2021/14/contents
Crimes include 'stirring up hate' by 'behaving in a manner that a reasonable person would consider to be threatening, abusive or insulting' to select groups. Looks like it allows nigh-limitless opportunities for selective enforcement. And a huge drain on police resources, given they can't even investigate all crimes:
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-68703684
'Rich person flaunts the law, confident they will never face consequences' is not a very unique or interesting story. It's certainly not 'brave' or anything... if no one rich or powerful is going to face any legal consequences of any kind over Epstein connections, you can be damn sure she's not going to pay for anything relating to this, either.
But I don't see why conservatives would think this is supporting any of their claims? The conservative claim has always been that they are oppressed for their views, living in constant danger of being cancelled or arrested by the woke mobs and captured government institutions.
Someone blatantly pointing out in the most public way possible that this has always been a fiction, that governments may make figleaf declarations about opposing these types of slander but will never actually enforce them because they actually are inherently conservative entities that are on the side of the privileged and the default, that anyone can make the most vile comments they want and always could without fearing legal reprisals, that the whole Petersonian rhetoric about free speech crackdowns was and always has been a charade... why is that good for her side, exactly?
I mean, I guess the truth is that I'm being too simplistic in considering it one 'side'.
The Peterson/'free speech absolutist' wing points at 'cancel culture' and the specter of government censorship as a general bludgeon against the left, but they're actually committed to a much more broad model of conservatism and just using that to stir up their base.
Whereas people like Rowling aren't fully committed to that broader conservative project, they just want to slander and eradicate trans people, and they're annoyed that people like Peterson have scared some of their supporters into thinking they might ever face consequences for spewing vile slander 24/7, thereby mildly restricting the spigot.
So while the two have been default bedfellows up till now, it seems like JK has recognized the conflict of interest there and is ready to abandon the pretense of being oppressed in favor of proving that it's safe for everyone to start spewing as publicly and loudly as possible.
Sometimes I think you just read posts, decide who's expressing the "conservative" (bad) position, and reflexively argue the opposite.
All right, you have hit one of my pet peeves, because I hear this shit all the time from my nice progressive friends. It's just repeated ad infinitum, as an article of faith, as a proven, established fac, that JK Rowling "hates trans people," that she "wants to slander and eradicate them," etc. In unrelated hobby spaces, I've seen it argued unironically, in all seriousness, that she literally advocates "genocide of trans people" (and also that Harry Potter goblins were intended to be metaphors for Jews because she also hates Jews).
I have been a Rowling fan since before she got on Twitter. Yes, I actually like the Harry Potter books (despite being way too old for them). I've read all her Cormoran Strike novels, and even The Casual Vacancy. I follow her on Twitter and I read her blog. So I know whereof I speak, though I won't claim I can remember every single thing she's ever said in public.
I have never seen her say anything that approaches "hate" or "wanting to eradicate" trans people. She has said the opposite many times. She is a standard issue very liberal second wave feminist.
What does she say?
I think all of these points are reasonable, and even if you disagree with some or all of them, none of them resemble anything like "hate" or wishing for a "trans genocide."
I would love it if you could point to me any public statement of hers, or even a reliable second-hand account of some alleged private statement, in which she's said anything that resembles what you are claiming.
Well, someone has to, if this forum is going to be anything other than a complete echo chamber.
Also 'reflexively' and 'intentionally, as an intellectual exercise' are different things.
First of all, there's a reason I said 'People like Rowling' and 'they' in that sentence. The whole post, if you read the rest of the post and not just that sentence, is about different factions on the conservative side of this issue, and the differences and disagreements between them.
While it's mildly true that Rowling plays a careful balancing act with her public image by not being too extreme in her own personal rhetoric, she is very much a part of a faction that does use rhetoric of that level of extremity (including onstage at national political conventions), and she very much supports and promotes (through valuable social media links and personal defenses and endorsements on her hugely popular accounts, through partnerships and collaborations, and by selectively endorsing and promoting the rhetoric of) people who famously do express those extreme views.
One could argue that in the early days of her involvement with this topic, she was just a useful idiot who didn't realize how extreme the people who were being nice to her and defending her were while other groups were attacking her for her views, and that she instinctively supported the people who were nice to her without realizing how extreme they were when not talking to her.
But this many years later, that's not a tenable position. She's not that dumb, at this point she understand who her bedfellows are and what their political program is about, and wholeheartedly assists them at every turn. At this point, the fact that she maintains a veneer of respectability in her own public statements is more cowardice and manipulation and intentional pipeline-creation than it is a sign of a mild position.
And, like, come on, you're obviously underselling what she says herself and what the implications of that are. She wrote a whole book about a serial killer pretending to be trans to prey on women in women's spaces. She says that she is glad trans didn't exist when she was growing up because she might have been socially infected with it and it would have ruined her life. Etc.
These types of things are the blood libel of the trans debate; they are all part of building a worldview in which trans women are just perverted men intentionally trying to prey on women and destroy them, and where trans identity is merely an infectious meme that needs to be stamped out before it takes more lives.
The fact that, after establishing that worldview and narrative, you don't vocally take the next step of saying 'and therefore we need to eradicate transgender people from the culture as a whole' is sort of irrelevant. You've spent decades carefully constructive a narrative in which that is the obvious and inescapable conclusion, if you convince people of your narrative then they will come to that conclusion without you needing to say it, that was the whole point of the narrative.
Anyway, if you want me to go find you links on all the Breadtube Rowling videos so you can comb through them for receipts, I guess I can. But I've done that a lot and people mostly say 'I'm not going to watch that'. Names to search would be contrapoints, shaun, philosophy tube, I don't remember probably lindsey ellis or big joel or someone talked about it, etc. Honestly I bet if you google 'JK Rowling anti-trans statements' you will find a comprehensive list pretty quickly, if you actually want to know it doesn't take me to do the googling for you.
No, no one has to reflexively argue the opposite. A principled leftist would do more than just spitefully fight for the sake of fighting and as such turn mottezians further against leftism by providing examples of the ideology they despise. He would lead with empathy while providing legit counterpoints that open up people's hearts and minds and make them think.
Isn't that why we're all here on this site though?
My opinion of leftism is fairly set in stone, we're many years past the point where further "examples" could change my mind one way or the other. Which also means that I attach relatively less emotion to the debates than I did a decade ago. Now I'm just here to argue out of pure love of the sport.
Personally, I'm here because I like reading fresh ideas, or fresh reframings of old ideas — "insight porn" as it were. Fresh ideas do not usually come from leftists, because it seems to me that one of leftism's greatest underlying personality traits, at least in our time, is conformity to group doctrine. (Perhaps this is correct doctrine, but it's not fresh. I can, almost without fail, predict not only a leftist's position on an issue, but exactly how they'll frame the argument.) Neither do fresh ideas come from offline conservatives, who are usually quite incurious and have stopped their ears to any new idea they did not learn by twenty.
Compared to leftist spaces or conservative spaces, online rightist spaces (as The Motte de facto is) are rent with interesting controversy. I suspect that's because there are many ways to be a heretic, but only one way to be catholic. The austrian economist and the populist, the fascist and the burkean, the vitalist and the christian, the hoppean and the neoreactionary, the sexual degeneracy watchdog and men-should-marry-teenagers poster: are able to discuss politely at present, but they're bound purely by the friend-enemy distinction, and their 'side' would burst into a million fragments the moment it sniffed political relevance.
That said, some people in the leftist coalition do have fresh ideas. It's extremely unlikely they'll change my opinion on the fundamental correctness of leftism, but that's not really the point for me. If you can make me re-frame an old opinion with your hot take, that's great.
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How To Convince Me That 2 + 2 = 3 seems relevant.
The problem from that perspective isn't that guesswho's arguing; it's that he's awful at it. It's bad enough when posters provide weakmen of their enemies. No one's going to change minds by providing weakmen of the position they claim to be defending.
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Well, if that's the case, then it really is an echo chamber, and there's no point in anyone playing Darwin2500's role and arguing the counter point. Also we should probably also change the banner on the side of the site.
Realistically, you're probably right to some degree. But I do believe it's possible for people to change their minds, even if just in small ways. Then small mind changes lead to bigger ones. But people don't change their mind by being nagged, mocked, and provoked by an enemy. They do it when people make great points and relate to each other.
I think all we need to not be an echo chamber is for posters to have a diversity of viewpoints, and to be comfortable expressing them. I don't think that the propensity of the average poster to change their mind has much to do with being a not-echo-chamber. Otherwise everywhere is an echo chamber, because it's rare for people to change their minds.
I also agree that it is possible for people to change their minds, it's just unlikely, and it takes a very specific set of circumstances that is unique to each individual.
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It's happening, just centered around the local Overton window. I admit to having my mind changed on a number of issues, although most weeks this place is a parade of events that make the left look bad while events that paint Red tribe in a bad light are largely ignored. If you want to see the future of the Overton window, look at the two recent threads on natural selection and epistemology. They actually generated discussion and genuine disagreement in ways that posts about Trump, trans issues, gun rights, police violence, immigration etc. never do anymore.
Cthulhu swims ever farther right. I have to say, it is interesting to have watched it happen over my last five odd years here.
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