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It's in my queue, but I've gotten like 90 replies since yesterday and the long ones take a long time to do justice (and I do have a job and a family). At this point most comments aren't going to get a reply, realistically.
I will say that 'carefully litigating every word JK Rowling has ever said to determine whether it is about X of just mentions X' is exhausting and frustrating.
Frustrating because it's really super irrelevant to my larger point about the rhetoric and factions involved here, which is the relevant thing I actually care about, which few have bothered to respond to (and which I'm trying to prioritize responses to). So many of the comments are nit-picking about whether I'm being 'fair' to Rowling, and I frankly don't give a fuck about one person like this and what they did or didn't say, the interesting issues are the larger factional concerns.
I'd be happy to just say 'sure, whatever, Rowling is a perfect angel who has never done anything wrong, if that's what you want to believe; can we please talk about my actual point though' if I thought that would get anywhere, but I doubt it.
Any updates?
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Is that a nitpick?
You started out by complaining about slander. Was that because you think slander is a serious, non-nit-picky thing, or was that just rhetoric targeting all the people here who do care about slander? Hopefully it's the former, but then since making untrue accusations of Rowling is slander, shouldn't you be horribly upset by even the possibility that you've committed it unwittingly?
Amping up the level of seriousness, you continued by complaining about blood libel ... but let's go back and look, and ah, there it is, "eradicate trans people". Either Rowling does want to eradicate trans people, or you personally have just committed blood libel. It is in fact a very important thing to determine whether you have done something so horrible or not - not a nit-pick! If it still feels like a nit-pick, which does seem like a potential consequence of the attitude of "frankly don't give a fuck about one person like this", that's not an excuse for evil, that's a confession of evil, but whether or not you strongly care about blood libel, you really shouldn't be surprised when other people do.
Even if you haven't committed blood libel, if there's some hot mic recording where we can hear Rowling talking about how she totally wants to murder all the transpeople, it would still be wrong to make the accusation against her in the awful, no-evidence-except-false-evidence way you have. The Boy Crying Wolf is not actually acting to protect people from the wolf! The next time your readers see such an accusation, even if the new accuser provides better evidence behind it, you've made "dive into the evidence, that won't be a waste of time" a slightly less safe conclusion for them to reach.
Has anyone actually said they believe that, or are you now putting words in their mouths too? Wasn't this a big part of the vicious cycle that eventually got Hlynka permabanned? When you find that making up strawmen is the only way to feel like you've brought your interlocutors down to your level then it's time to consider climbing up to theirs instead.
This is another confession, though framed as an attempt to blame the victims. You aren't supposed to avoid telling falsehoods because you expect to gain something out of unnatural self-restraint, you are supposed to avoid telling falsehoods because avoidance of evil is worthwhile for its own sake! And then, if you are incapable of that, the blame is entirely on you, not on any people who might not have rewarded you as much as you would have wanted otherwise.
There's a naive-utilitarian inside me that's tempted to agree! On the meta level alone, this thread is a fascinating microcosm of them, even! We can see how factionalism gets exacerbated by outgroup homogeneity bias. We can see how our faction's noble goals get used to excuse harsh tactics while our enemies' dirty tactics reinforce our disdain for their hypocritiical goals. And when we zoom out far enough, we come to perhaps the most interesting question: isn't it at least sometimes okay if we "don't give a fuck about one person"? If with such an eagles-eye-level view we learn something helpful to a hundred other people then we're still ninety-nine in the black, and that sounds like a win, doesn't it?
And yet ... do we actually have an eagles-eye-level view, just because we'd really like to have one? Here you are, purportedly trying to get people to care about slander and blood libel, while you're in the middle of committing it and trying to make excuses for it. You don't help even the victims you do care about by trying to normalize the crimes being committed against them! Letting this kind of rhetoric slide wouldn't clearly be sacrificing one person's reputation to save 100 others, it might just as likely be sacrificing one person's reputation to harm 100 others!
Since we're this bad at trying to figure out all the second-order and third-order effects that a non-naive utilitarian would need to consider, maybe it's just time to back off and look at virtue ethics instead?
There's a quote from Dostoyevsky dialogue that comes to mind here:
"...the more I love mankind in general, the less I love people in particular, that is, individually, as separate persons. In my dreams, I often went so far as to think passionately of serving mankind, and, it may be, would really have gone to the cross for people if it were somehow suddenly necessary, and yet I am incapable of living in the same room with anyone even for two days, this I know from experience. ... I become the enemy of people the moment they touch me."
From a moral standpoint, it's very dangerous to lose love for individual people but then hope to make it up to humanity in volume. A lot of people who decided to care about fighting "principalities and powers" at the expense of mere "flesh and blood" just ended up shedding a lot of blood without actually improving any balance of power - we easily promise to repay today's certain nearby moral debts with interest after tomorrow's vaguely-expected distant moral credit comes in, and yet that ends up being an excuse to increase the debt, not a real plan to make good.
But even from just an epistemological, pragmatic make-my-ideology-win standpoint: a "faction" isn't a smooth undifferentiated mass that you can stuff a bunch of people into to avoid having to look at each one's particular flaws and virtues. The more details you ignore, the more mistakes you're going to make! If you do the rhetorical equivalent of air-striking a wedding party because you're certain there are terrorists nearby, don't be surprised if you end up creating more enemies than you neutralize!
I appreciate you coming here and representing locally-unpopular points of view, even when you're getting dogpiled for it, but can you imagine the damage if your readers started to assume that everyone who might be considered part of your "faction" or "people like" you was guilty of the same logical and moral flaws you've exhibited in this thread? At least try to imagine, and then consider what you could change to moderate their future reactions accordingly? Outgroup homogeneity bias is a common human failing, and I doubt I've managed to even cure you of it in the space of a few paragraphs, so I surely haven't cured most of the people with that failing who don't see themselves in you and don't realize how much of these warnings might apply to them too. Now might be a good time to show them that their outgroup can admit mistakes and do better. The psychological foibles that sadly lead us to factionalism and division are indeed an interesting object of study, but if you really want to be sure you know a subject, then the most important part of studying isn't the reading, it's working the exercises at the end.
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Look, I do appreciate you arguing on here with us and you're getting hammered with a lot of negative replies, but to be extremely basic about it: you started it.
You're the one said "Rowling said x, y and z that is anti-trans". You then quoted things which are inaccurate and known to be inaccurate. When pushed, you then tried logic-chopping with "I didn't say Blorgs are cannibals, I said people like Blorgs are cannibals" which is one of those differences that make no difference; if a cannibal is like a Blorg, then a Blorg is like a cannibal, so you are in effect saying Blorgs are cannibals.
Then you went with the blood libel bit, which whoa Nelly.
And now you're pulling "anyways it doesn't matter if she said it or not". Well if it doesn't matter, then why did you bring it up in the first place?????
We're pedants and nit-pickers and obsessives on here, if you say "It is known that beeps are boops", you are going to get nine million names of "how is it known and by whom is it known and where is it known and how is it that a beep may be a boop?" in response.
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Fascinating how you have seemingly limitless time to expound your opinions, but the second you get any pushback on them, all of a sudden you're far too busy to spend time on something as trivial as defending the opinions and factual statements you voluntarily chose to make. And it's not even the first time you've fallen back on this excuse: "I've responded to about 20 long replies in the last 6 hours, and I also have a job and stuff."
Anything to avoid taking the L and admitting "you know what, maybe my synopsis of this novel I haven't read didn't accurately describe the plot and characters, mea culpa" or "actually I really was misinformed about the state of the evidence regarding the structure of trans women's brains, thanks for disabusing me of my misconceptions" or "oh, people actually have been criminally convicted for misgendering, thanks for pointing it out".
If you didn't give a fuck about Rowling and what she did and didn't say, it sure is weird to dedicate no less than six entire paragraphs in this comment and two in this one to her opinions and the motivations behind them. Like seriously, this comment is 650 words long, and 480 of those words are specifically about Rowling and hardly mention the broader gender-critical movement. Then multiple people point out that several of the factual assertions you're making in these comments are provably, demonstrably false, and you change the subject: "it doesn't matter what Rowling said, I'm talking about the broader faction - the point I was making wasn't even about Rowling actually". This is the same kind of facile goalpost-moving as "it doesn't matter if this specific hate crime was staged, it started a conversation!"
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Oh no, you don't get to duck out that easily.
You started this, and you started it with multiple, very specific, very damning statements about a very specific person (JK Rowling) which you claimed were obviously and provably true. And when I took on the challenge and went down the list of every one of your accusations, you suddenly play "Oh well, that wasn't my point, I don't actually care about Rowling"?
No, dude. You clearly do care about Rowling.
If we're talking about JK Rowling (and we are), it actually matters what she actually said. I mean, if you were accusing me of being a Holocaust-denying white nationalist who also thinks we should abolish the age of consent, and you based that on my saying some things that Holocaust-denying white nationalists who also think we should abolish the age of consent say, you can bet I would care a lot about carefully litigating the words I actually said, because if you are accusing someone of holding reprehensible views, it matters whether they actually said the things you are accusing them of! You don't get to just accuse them of believing all the things the very worst people in their "faction" say!
I directly addressed your entire "This is what her faction believes and this is what her rhetoric inevitably leads to" argument! If you disagree with me, go ahead and point out where my reasoning is flawed, but don't claim I didn't bother to respond to it!
I find it frustrating that you make specific, provably untrue statements (for example, repeating bullshit about how Troubled Blood is about a serial killer who pretends to be trans and tries to sneak into women's spaces, as evidence of how much Rowling hates trans people) and when this is contradicted by people who actually read the book, you don't even acknowledge it, you're just all "Oh, I don't actually care about Rowling."
I mean, we can all agree Rowling has FU money and immense popularity and can't actually be harmed by anyone saying mean and dishonest things about her. The reason we're arguing about Rowling is because people much less wealthy and powerful than her who say similar things (the people in her "faction" as you keep calling it) are suffering tangible harms, harms which you apparently believe are justified. So yeah, if you claim that JK Rowling wants a trans genocide, or that her "faction" does and she's abetting it, then that has implications for people who are not JK Rowling and that's why you are being challenged, not because everyone here is a JK Rowling fan.
Transparent straw man. Stop this kind of disingenuous whining.
Yes, let's. It's your turn.
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