Read Aja Romano's fanlore page, they are truly bonkers and a perfect example of the slash fandom to trans pipeline. (They wrote cringey, cringey underage Harry/Draco fics - you know, enemies to lovers cliche fests)
I was really into the LJ Harry Potter/sci fi scene as a teen/young adult and everyone in the "Inner Circle" of big name fans were awful awful people.
And Jesse's spot on about the Peter Pan syndrome. I can't even participate in my current fandoms because it's full of these people just screaming about trans rights and bullying creators into making the most boring bland lbgt characters.
A quick deep dive into fandom history and how we got where we are with the obsessive politics stuff:
What led up to this, is actually wild in retrospect - there was a massive war in sci fi fandom when a bunch of conservative sci fi writers decided to basically cheat their way to getting Hugo awards because they lost their minds that Anne Leckie's Ancillary Justice won a Hugo. (Part of the world building is in that society, they only have one pronoun, and it's "she". It's a cool thought expirement, and a great book). This is also where Chuck Tingle got his big break. (Google "Sad Puppies" if you want all the dirt.)
A few years earlier, LiveJournal (the home for teen girls obsessed with fandom pre Tumblr) decided to ban all underage sexual content as a last ditch effort to get more ad revenue, and mass deleted a bunch of extremely popular fanfic communities. People lost their minds, and the whole thing was called "Strikethrough" (because this is how deleted accts look on LJ). LJ relented eventually, but the damage was done and LJ as a platform started to die (Except for some hard-core sci fi people, GRRM had an LJ with a 2004 default layout well into when GOT was on HBO)
Strikethrough directly led to the formation of Archive of Our Own (AO3), the site that hosts all the filthy fanfiction you could ever want to read, and their parent nonprofit the Organization for Transformative Works (which is actually pretty cool) and the mass exodus to Dreamwidth (an LJ clone, not particularly successful) and the rise of Tumblr.
Why do I mention all of this? Because Aja has been widely mocked for filming themselves trying to burn an LJ shirt and failing during Strikethrough.
Edited to add because my last paragraphs got cut off somehow:
People learned that they could get positive attention for having the "right" opinions, because at the time everyone was so furious about the Sad Puppies and losing their porn. This dovetailed with the Obama campaign being most of these people's first experience with politics and the Obama team's masterful use of social media.
"Around the same time, LiveJournal (the home for teen girls obsessed with fandom pre Tumblr) decided to ban all underage sexual content as a last ditch effort to get more ad revenue, and mass deleted a bunch of extremely popular fanfic communities."
Oh, not just ANY fanfic communities, remember? They banned the SNARRY (Snape/Harry) fanfic communities. xD
Same. I did have a pretty active LiveJournal account but now I can't even remember which groups I was in. I've always felt intimidated by fandom culture because I'm bad at remembering details, and people that identify as fans tend to be obnoxious about shit like that.
The whole Snarry thing... It started out as a well respected fic writer seeing if they could do it, then turned into teens and 20-somethings fantasizing about banging Alan Rickman through being Harry, thennnn it got really weird.
Something else but wow, I haven't heard of the one you just described. I almost want to go find that now. I mean, I've read My Immortal and crackfic doesn't get worse/more hilarious than that. The epitome of hilarible.
This is an excellent quick dive into the weird fandom side of things, thank you.
This is totally tangential, sorry, I just want to complain, but I don't understand why people keep commissioning articles from Aja.
I get it on some level - they get paid for their takes because they have a knack for triggering the "someone is wrong on the internet" button in all kinds of online nerds, and that sparks Engagement, fine, whatever.
(Look, I have a grudge! :) Aja wrote a very stupid article about one of my favorite TV shows a year or so ago. I know that's a petty, petty thing to hold a grudge about, but in my defense, the article was aggressively bad. They certainly aren't the only progressive media critic who engages with a piece of media in the worst possible faith and expects everyone to agree with them that the work is Causing Harm, but I can't take them seriously and it irritates me when I see their work published. Aja in particular has no media literacy, why are they employed as a critic?)
Look, we can talk about whether anything Flanagan does is "good" or not, but Aja wrote like a thousand words about how this show was too sympathetic to organized religion and largely failed in its critiques of Christianity.
For context, the plot of the TV show in question (this is a literal synopsis, I'm not joking, Flanagan isn't subtle, bless him): Christianity Twists Good People Into Homicidal Monsters, Everyone Dies.
(I know that traditionally, this is where you're supposed to go through an article and explain why it's wrong line by line, but there's almost no point? Aja needed a clickbait Take, so she went with "hmmm. lot of religious imagery in this tv show. don't like that*," when the show in question spent seven hours arguing that religious communities are all about three bad weeks away from going Full Jonestown.)
*yes I know I'm being uncharitable, this is my grudge and I'm allowed!
I get that not every writer gets to pick their own titles, and titles are going to be as clickbaity as possible, but yes, that was also very irritating.
(Sorry, I'm beating the dead horse: this is one of Flanagan's nastier and more depressing shows, so ehhhh, are there "heroes"? Arguably not, but one of the more moral and clear headed protagonists is an atheist. There *is* "representation", she just didn't notice it or like it. That's not the same as being "erased," oh my god, I cannot stand the current wave of criticism where, when something doesn't work *for you*, you reverse engineer an acceptable Social Justicy reason for why it's Bad.
Ancillary Justice was SO good. And you are 100% right on SFF fandom. Am just waiting for a new wave to come along now and hoping for something more interesting than the current crop of writers (except for Ada Palmer and Jo Walton who continue to be amazing)
Oh man, I remember the Hugo awards kerfuffle but I didn't realize 'Ancillary Justice' was what pissed people off. I really enjoyed that series. I didn't even realize people considered it 'woke'.
I was directly involved in Racefail, several of my LJ friends have posts in the roundups, but I felt like that comment was already getting far far too long to get into that. And very true wrt rationslist/athiesm+ overlap, but you saw that more on the general SFF side than in female led HP fandom. I don't know anyone within the corner of HP fandom I was heavily involved in (a huge rating comm) who read Eliezer's HP fic, for example.
Elevatorgate was definitely a big topic of conversation, but pretty much no one I knew was actually "in" those spaces.
Tingle saying he'd have Zoe Quinn accept his award if he won the Hugo (for the non-nerds: the Sad Puppies spammed noms for Tingle in order to humiliate the Hugos - Tingle handled it with humor and grace and its why he's so beloved to this day) is where it crosses over into GamerGate.
Yeah, I meant "at the time", Tingle's excellent at following the trends. Self IDs as autistic when that became popular, has been hinting that they're trans themselves, probably so they can do a reveal that they're been a woman all along but they ID as a man.
Yeah, I forget how long I was a part of internet fandom and how much stuff I'd assumed people just KNEW until I'll mention something and get blank stares (i.e. "what do you mean you don't know Cassie Claire of YA fame started off writing a Draco/Ginny fanfic triology and got harassed for setting up the equivalent of a GoFundMe to replace a stolen laptop circa 2006?"
I was thinking the same thing! Except a podcast. I've been seeing some YouTube video essays popping up on some of the journalfen exposés (I just saw one in my recommendations on MsScribe / bad_penny) and I know there is scholarly work on older fandom (Robert Kozinets, the father of Netnography, developed it doing his PhD on Trek usenet).
Honestly, as a qual marketing researcher, I probably have the chops to do it - maybe I should.
I actually had a thought on books -- not on fandom, but It Came From Something Awful does cover that era, and Kill All Normies is more focused on chan culture around the Trump election.
I never got much into fandoms, it always felt too much like organized religion to me. That said, I was fascinated by Larry Correia’s exchange with GRR Martin over the Hugo slates. The lefty “trufans” making the sad puppies point for them by blowing up the Hugos rather than allow conservatives to win and Martin trying to talk them down.
One of the prescient moments foreshadowing our current authoritarian trends.
Sorry for the tangent, but I just recently started getting into the Laundry Files (as in, like, literally just finished "The Atrocity Archives" last week), and your comment makes me wonder if there's some point in the list of titles that you would recommend stopping.
I missed the Laundry Files restarting and downloaded his two new ones last year. Christ. The first book has a trans character (a FTM teenager) which I rolled with, but in the second book he specifically depicts Mumsnet as colluding with the weird American religious cult on human sacrifices.
Yes Charlie you plonker, British mothers worried about the suitability of self ID and paediatric sex change are definitely just exactly like an authoritarian US Christian right. It’s just a bit rich coming from the man who wrote Equoid, y’know.
My favorite part of the blocked and reported podcast is when katie makes a joke about pronouns and jesse gets extremely nervous and immediately changes the subject
The author never again refers to Justin with a pronoun. Why?
Pronouns obviously make no sense in this context. Imagine trying to read an article that refers to a single person as he, she, and they. No chance you could follow along.
'They' is almost impossible to follow along with when you talk about a single, known person in relation to other people. 'Themselves' sounds like parody. Just revoke their pronouns already.
> 'They' is almost impossible to follow along with when you talk about a single, known person in relation to other people. 'Themselves' sounds like parody. Just revoke their pronouns already.
Right! And the activists who screech "But 'they' has been used as a singular pronoun for centuries!" aren't being truthful.
It has been used for an unknown person. "I'd like to find the owner of this lost glove so I can return it to them" but *never* for a known person "If you see Mary ask them to shut up" and is confusing.
I'd happily refer to a person a consistent set of pronouns -- either he/him or she/her-- based on his or her preference. But I won't use made-up words or grammatical nonsense. Hurts my brain too much.
Agree that they should never be used in a news article to refer to a single person, it’s entirely too confusing. But in spoken conversation it’s easier to follow along and doesn’t really bother me.
Man that times article hurt my brain. Two honest questions: If someone uses all pronouns does that mean you can never misgender them? Or do you have to know which one they’re currently feeling? And isn’t trans nonbinary oxymoronic? I thought I was keeping up with this stuff but then another curveball comes my way
This is why after 20 years I don't subscribe ($ goes to BRpod) or read the NYT anymore. How can you possibly believe ANYTHING from a "news" source that writes this headline: "She killed two women. At 83, she is charged with killing a third" about a MALE serial killer?
That Hogwarts Legacy is already poised to become one of the best-selling games of all time tells you all you need to know how important these drama microcells are in the end.
As for Armie, he's obviously a next-level sex weirdo but the utter destruction of his career seems far out of line with what he actually did.
Didn't Anne Helen Peterson write some article about him back in the day about how only in the cisheteropatriarchal Hollywood system could Armie Hammer get so many chances to "happen?" It seems like he was a target because of some interpersonal beefs unrelated to the fact that he's a shitty romantic/sexual partner.
I also remember that when Call Me by Your Name was out there was this obnoxious discourse about whether Hammer's character was a sexual predator because Timothee Chalemet's character was only 17. A sneak preview of things to come.
I think you've placed your finger on it. Armie Hammer is the kind of guy it's easy for woke types to despise--white, male, born of privilege--and he didn't become A Good Guy to diffuse that antipathy. He just enjoyed the benefits of success, and for that he could not be forgiven.
I used to read Petersen regularly (we both got our PhDs from same program) but I’ve stopped (and told her so) after an insane interview with some awful English professor writing word salad about intersectional identities. Anyway, IIRC her Armie Hammer piece was snotty and snobby--as if there were something uniquely bad about him, rather than that he just didn’t get lucky with most of the movies he was in. I’m realizing that today I probably hate everything that I used to think was good. 🤷🏻♀️
What makes me sad (and exasperated) is that thousands of Rowling's fans have been led to believe that the author of their beloved franchise hates them.
Yeah, except that whatever bad things are said of JK aren't true. The fans really are just hurting themselves! It's pathetic, but also I do feel bad for those who have such an external locus of control.
Well. JK Rowling does not believe trans women really are women. If you truly believe that trans women are women; and to believe otherwise is transphobic; in that sense; she is
We need to wave goodbye to Jared O’Mara MP, banged up for four years this week. He forged £40,000 of expense payments to a made-up “Autism consultancy” he gave the address of a branch of McDonalds so he could pay off his coke dealer. He’d have got away with it, if he hadn’t been a Corbynite MP with a history of calling women ugly slags on Twitter.
The best bit of his story is that voters preferred him to Nick Clegg, now head of global PR at Meta. Master of the Universe, if no longer of Sheffield Hallam.
Whatever I think of the Rowling controversies in particular, I can't help but empathize with HP fans somewhat because I get it. I was a little too old to be all in on Harry Potter, but I was just the right age to be all in on the Whedonverse. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was just as important to me as a teenager as Harry Potter was to some younger millennials. The fall of Joss Whedon was sad, but if one watched season 4 and 5 of Angel at all, not surprising. Even back then I could tell that someone had it out for Charisma Carpenter.
I understand the urge to write Whedon out of Buffy lore, but to me that's immature. He may be a real life version of Angelus without David Boreanaz's good looks, but that terribleness was part of the person who created one of, however flawed, the richest best pieces of pop culture that ever existed. You can say all you want that without the rest of the writing team (Marti Noxon, David Fury, etc.) and actors (Sarah Michelle Gellar, Anthony Stewart Head, James Marsters, etc.) the Whedonverse shows wouldn't have been as great as they were and no argument there. But they wouldn't exist period without Joss Whedon.
Growing up is accepting that people you don't agree with, even those who have beliefs or behaviors you find repugnant, will create work that is good and meaningful to you. It's not "separating the art from the artist" as it's understood on the Internet - sticking your hands in your ears and pretending that imagining the world without its creator is a viable choice. It's accepting that people are multifaceted, that bad people can create good art, art that resonates with you without you being a bad person.
If what you learn about the artist retroactively makes everything you enjoyed retroactively poisonous and you have to disown it. For me, that was anything related to Marion Zimmer Bradley and her Mists of Avalon saga. But in that case, the thing to do is forgive yourself for not knowing, disconnect from the fandom and leave it behind. If your connection to a fandom is so intense as to be a load-bearing part of your personality that you can't let it go even if its creator is a someone you find odious...well that's a much bigger problem than said creator's problematic views or actions.
Oh I'm not saying Rowling did anything near what Joss Whedon did. I just used the Whedon example to show how I handled learning that a formative piece of pop culture for me was created by someone I find distasteful.
As far as I'm concerned the only thing both Whedon and Rowling have done wrong that I'm sure of (since its all questionable accusations by motivated agents anyway) is to subscribe to the woke ideology until their frothing comrades came for them too. Both Whedon and Rowling got what they'd given to others many times. I say this as someone who loves the Whedonverse and thinks HP is incredible. They lived by the sword and "died" by the same.
Could you show me, or tell me, where JK Rowling was woke and has 'given to others many times'? I'm really not sure what you are referring to. She did donate to the Labour Party, but many non-wokes do that. She has set up a women's rape crisis centre, and has a children's charity, she has rescued Afghani women and children. She is a personal hero of mine, but maybe we shouldn't have heroes and if you can show how she's lived by the sword I will change my mind. As for Whedon, I'm a huge Buffy fan and always will be and no matter what Whedon's done, I'll always thank him for giving me the Buffyverse.
Sure, both Whedon and Rowling have invoked “the patriarchy” and made accusations of bigotry against (generally conservatives) those they considered opponents.
I love both of their creative worlds but their personal politics have always been hypocritical and the victim ideology weaponized against them is the same ideology they have weaponized against others.
I have some sympathy for what was done to them but, ideologically speaking, they're reaping what they’ve sown.
There's so much cognative dissonance about this in SFF - as an adult I got into Star Trek, and if you know anything about Roddenberry or Rick Berman (showrunner during 90s Trek), there are massive skeletons in that closet. Horrific things happened on set. Female talent was treated terribly.
Somehow they can handwave that and continue to consume and consume, but not JKR's wrongthink.
(They've also conveniently forgotten George Takei's run as a dirty old man on Howard Stern, which is fucking hilarious.)
OMG my husband likes Howard Stern and years ago we had Sirius Radio just to listen to it... so I heard a fair share of shows back then (2002/3) but was never a fan. I still cringe when I remember some of the things that I heard... I think there was a trans-identified male and one of the other people in the show's orbit slept with "her," or I'm mixing up stories and HOLY SHIT why is this taking up space in my brain?
"If you want to die, or at least wish you were dead." I love the way Primos turn a phrase here.
I'll pass on looking it up. I had the misfortune today of looking at some TIM whose Twitter is just him jerking off in women's spaces for like 3 seconds and I wanted to put hand sanitizer on my eyes. (I've seen those types of videos before but they were in clips collected by gender criticals, and they at least blurred out the ladydique & lady balls.)
Oh god I might have seen this too on Thursday - there was a blurred version but a quick click through to the original creator's Twitter was, like, UGH. I woke up Friday morning with one eye crusted shut; it might well have been in self-defense.
Ugh, I looked it up. It's just childishness. The works you love were sometimes by created by people you don't love, or may even loathe. Either accept it or give up the art and the artist altogether.
'Black trans sex workers are victimized by violence at a rate almost as high as that of black men.' Is that true? If it is, how do black men just not instantly turn into the Joker when they learn this. According to that statistic a black man would actually REDUCE their chance of being victimized by violence by transitioning and taking up sex work, but suddenly everyone online would actually care about it.
So...a black man who larps as a woman has the same statistical chance of being murdered as a black man who doesn't larp as a woman? QUEL SURPRISE. It's almost like...um....
The problem I keep having re: Hogwarts Legacy discourse is that I am addicted to reading insane opinions about it but also people are now posting spoilers all over the place, and I haven’t even decided if I want to eventually play the game or not (I have a lot of other games I want to play already and I’m currently in a long-term polyamorous relationship with both Fortnite and Final Fantasy XIV).
Anyway, there’s a YouTuber named Jessie Earl (https://twitter.com/jessiegender) who has made several bad faith videos about J.K. Rowling (including a recent one that clocks in at 3.5 hours), and she has been tweeting a bunch about how playing the game means that you’re not an ally to the trans community. She has hypothesized that the game’s enormous financial success is evidence of transphobia as opposed to, I dunno, people wanting to play a game based on one of the most popular franchises in the world. J.K. Rowling actually mentioned Jessie in a tweet back in December responding to some of her criticisms, which has only served to further Jessie’s victimhood narrative (https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1604180531155017731?s=20&t=3_OyAa97goaVgBpQJ_B6lg). I just find her to be a good example of the toxicity and lack of self-awareness present in this discourse.
I think ultimately the real dilemma with the J.K. Situation is that you have an entire community of people who have come to believe (under somewhat dubious pretenses) that Rowling represents an existential threat and there is nothing that can be done to convince them otherwise, because if you dare to suggest that she’s not evil, you are then also viewed as a bigot and will no longer be listened to. That being said, I did talk to a normie friend the other day who is not very online, and he too has noticed a lot of the insanity regarding “woke” stuff. I mentioned to him that I don’t think J.K. Rowling is really as bad as some make her out to be and he agreed with me. So it’s just important to remember that people on the Internet are insane, and that the best thing you can do is interact with people who are not extremely online.
I'm convinced that only about 10% of the anger at Rowling is over what she has actually said and the other 90% is impotent rage over the fact that she was marked for destruction, but is still beloved and powerful, and no amount of cringy NY Times ads or YouTube auto-da-fés can change that.
It's about using her as an example to show others the cost of speaking out. It teaches people to self-censor, to automatically not even expose themselves to information that goes against what their peer environment believes lest their opinion start to change, because the consequences would be too severe.
I wish I could give you an additional like for using auto-da-fés in a sentence. So rarely see it used these days and it should really be more common parlance, all things considered.
Since two people have said it so far, I feel obliged to remind everyone that the plural of "auto-da-fé" is "autos-da-fé," like attorneys general or courts martial.
J.K. Rowling literally murdered my entire family. Your comment downplaying her evil has caused me irreparable psychic harm, and will lead to countless black trans deaths, probably.
Good one. But to be fair, the Fifth Column guys do a lot more "news and politics" than most heterodox podcasters, so there is always interesting content. They could do a show 4-5 days a week without getting stale.
Very true, though I think BarPod has the market cornered on "crazy woke people ruin a business." I sincerely hope they do the one about the Anti-Racist Educator who got cancelled by his woke, Anti-Racist students.
I also really enjoy Katie’s exposés of lying internet grifters. She mentioned ages ago that she couldn’t find a topic for a book, but I reckon she could do a Jon Ronson-esque deep dive into why people lie on the internet for clout/oppression points
I am glad to see K&J being very prolific. I am not so glad that a huge chunk of the content is still about trans issues. I've personally developed trans fatigue; but I know many other subscribers enjoy it.
In a odd deflection, Wired says the game is antisemitic, because it refers to a global organization that secretly runs the world and enslaves people. Admittedly, this does move my whiskers a bit: Nobody's anti-semetic-dar is sharper than mine. But since Conde Nasty has said many a blatent anti-semitic thing in their magazines (usually under the guise of "we're just critical of Israel!") I think this critique is disingenuous.
The reviewer concluded: "it's definitely not worth it unless your goal is to cause harm."
I'm old and haven't played a video game since Pong. I'm thinking of buying this one.
I've always found it so odd that the left's antisemitism is so consequence free, under their own social justice BS rules especially. Now, its not to say that legit criticism of Israel can't be leveled, even of the "sinister cabal" variety. Mearsheimer and Walt's The Israel Lobby is a good example. Still, when the left hammers Israel on human rights those same critics are deafeningly silent when it's Saudi Arabia, Venezuela or even the Philippines.
For me, the most striking thing, especially among tech & gaming social justice hypocrites is that their entire industry is built on slave children mining in the DRC and sweatshop labor in China and they all have shockingly little to say on the subject and certainly won't "boycott" the products of slavery.
So, for some tech "journalist" to talk about a game causing "harm" is just hysterical. The arbitrary nature of their "morality" and deliberate ignorance continues to floor me.
It. Is fascinating how there is rightfully a lot of indignation about horrible violations in the West Bank. But silence on China.
I think what is going on is that right now white people do evil things. Jews are white. Israel is a white country and they are harming brown people
China -;they are all POC. It is not as bad.
I also think and I have said this before that anti semitism has been around for thousands of years. It does not just disappear. And while plenty of anti Zionism is not anti semitism; it is very easy to hide anti semitism behind anti Zionism.
But there is very little nuance about any of this. Like in NYC; pretty much all the anti Asian hate crimes were done by black people. Which is evidence of white supremacy.
I mean. What is the right anti racist queer take if say in Times Square a straight Palestinian man spits on an Israeli trans woman? What if the Israeli is the child of Syrian immigrants? A black gay woman is bothered by a white trans woman?
Would I get anywhere at Apple or even be taken seriously by anyone if I stood up at a company meeting and demanded Apple close its Picadilly Circus store?
I spend a fair amount of time in Belfast and the West Bank, and the similarities are striking. For example, there are walls between neighborhoods, sometimes block by block. Loyalist streets have British flags flying on every house. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_lines
The only way I can understand that sort of incoherence is as cynical corporate messaging. They hope to catch the ideological unthinking youth by signaling allegiance to conflicting but common social justice bullshit a la BLM, abolish police, etc.
Don’t know if readers here are aware of the massive chemical spill in Ohio in a place called East Palestine. The news seems remarkably uninterested; it seems to me they would care more if it was actually in Palestine.
"I think it’s because LGBTQIA+ people and genuine allies are some of the best creative minds in the world, and these films and this game were made largely without them."
To me, it looks like anti-Rowling people have pivoted to “Antisemitism” as a way to ratchet up their claims that anyone who so much as side-eyes the game supports Literal Genocide. It hasn’t been a subtle shift from “anti-TERF” language to accusations of antisemitism.
What's amusing to me is that the same people who are are the most vocal with with all this gender-spectrum and pronoun mayhem are almost universally virulent anti-semites (thinly disguised as anti-Zionisim).
Btw if youre a fan of Harry Potter the game is incredible. Clearly a labor of love for the creators. I think it’d lose some of the ~~magic~~ if you’re not a fan but prob would still be fun
Is it anything like Red Dead Redemption? (Ie big open world, lots of quests but also the opportunity to just kick back and explore/wizarding equivalent of flower picking and fishing?)
I'm mid-40s & had a Nintendo back in the day, but never finished the first Mario Brothers game so clearly I'm #Old, so forgive the stupid questions. Are they streamed? Or do you buy something physical (I said #Old and I meant it)? I noticed the screenshot of the site that outs people for having streamed the game. Are there privacy settings to prevent that?
(Just remembered we had a Wii for a bit, but I can't remember anything else about it.)
1) The game can be bought as a physical copy for some game systems or downloaded onto a computer
2) streaming is a ubiquitous modern game thing where gamers basically Zoom-call screen-sharing while gaming. Game companies support it because it’s basically free advertising and the entire platform called Twitch was built around streaming games.
Yes, people watch people play games, which makes a lot of sense to me as someone who watched my mom play King’s Quest as a child.
Pet peeve: it is not “failing” the trolley problem to say it’s not okay to kill one person to save two, it just means you’re not a strict utilitarian. The whole point is to get at the question of whether it’s okay to cause deaths in order to save others, and there are good reasons we should be nervous about ethics systems that say it would be okay to, say, sacrifice one healthy person if their organs could save n lives.
Anyway the obsession with trolley problems wrt AI is dumb, we should be training self driving cars to avoid running into any pedestrians rather than try to make on-the-fly judgements about which pedestrians are okay to take out.
Yeah, the trolley problem is more complicated than they presented it.
Doing nothing, I.e. not taking active steps to divert the train to kill one instead of two people is perfectly moral. We are not omniscient- at any point outside variables affect outcomes in ways we can’t predict.
My young daughter has started reading Harry Potter and loves it. She keeps trying to get me to read it because "it has comedy and mystery." I'm just waiting for the first left student teacher at school to get on her case about it
The most striking thing to me about the polling on trans issues is that the “trans support” is declining, which is, iirc, not how polling about gay marriage acted (it was strikingly uphill). It reminds me a bit of abortion, which is... an unpleasant thought. (Trans culture war for 30 years... shudder.)
After hearing the Armie Hammer story (and this is the first I heard of it, because I don't tend to follow actor drama), I believe he really did psychologically abuse those women. Having experienced psychological abuse myself, this thought even crossed my mind before it was explicitly brought up. The very nature of psychological abuse is that it's insidious, and it blurs the lines between what's consensual and what's not.
And psychological abuse within a "kinky" relationship can make for a very dangerous combination. I know someone who ended up permanently disabled from repeated "kinky" sex with their narcissist "dom" partner. Add to that, the fact that sadomasochistic sexual desires often have a deep dark psychological component, leading many people to choose this lifestyle for unhealthy reasons, and it becomes very easy for someone to get very badly hurt--at least psychologically, if not also physically.
I'm not saying this is as bad as if Armie had literally committed violent rape in the way that the "Me Too" narrative was describing. But it's still pretty serious.
These kinds of issues are why many radical feminists are "anti-kink." Because it can become very unhealthy. Personally I don't think the solution is to try and "kink-shame" people out of it, but I do think these issues should be allowed to be discussed.
Glad to see someone in the comments with more of a nuanced take. Katie and Jessie, I’ve noticed, seem kink positive to a fault. Just because someone is engaging in “kink” does not mean they are mentally healthy or mature enough to understand the long term repercussions of their actions. These women may have falsely accused Armie of rape (inexcusable) but I do not think he is completely innocent of manipulation. Those kinds of sexual fantasies can be very damaging if you drag other people into them. I hope to see more conversations moving forward which acknowledge kink as something potentially harmful. Too often kink culture is used as a shield to excuse violent, degrading and misogynistic behavior.
But...DID he drag them into it? Or were they into it too? Or did they pretend to be into it because they wanted him to like him? Or did he nag them into doing it?
I also think that in this instance, the kink in question is so off-putting that it hurts Hammer's image and appeal, regardless of the other allegations. Even if his relationships with these women represented the platonic ideal of abuse-free, consent-based kink . . . knowing that he fantasizes about eating women's ribs is just too much. It's weird, it's disturbing, it's kind of gross, and it makes it harder to view him as a romantic lead. Maybe I am engaging in kink shaming, but I suspect that many people (most people?) would have a similar reaction.
Read Aja Romano's fanlore page, they are truly bonkers and a perfect example of the slash fandom to trans pipeline. (They wrote cringey, cringey underage Harry/Draco fics - you know, enemies to lovers cliche fests)
https://fanlore.org/wiki/Aja
I was really into the LJ Harry Potter/sci fi scene as a teen/young adult and everyone in the "Inner Circle" of big name fans were awful awful people.
And Jesse's spot on about the Peter Pan syndrome. I can't even participate in my current fandoms because it's full of these people just screaming about trans rights and bullying creators into making the most boring bland lbgt characters.
A quick deep dive into fandom history and how we got where we are with the obsessive politics stuff:
What led up to this, is actually wild in retrospect - there was a massive war in sci fi fandom when a bunch of conservative sci fi writers decided to basically cheat their way to getting Hugo awards because they lost their minds that Anne Leckie's Ancillary Justice won a Hugo. (Part of the world building is in that society, they only have one pronoun, and it's "she". It's a cool thought expirement, and a great book). This is also where Chuck Tingle got his big break. (Google "Sad Puppies" if you want all the dirt.)
A few years earlier, LiveJournal (the home for teen girls obsessed with fandom pre Tumblr) decided to ban all underage sexual content as a last ditch effort to get more ad revenue, and mass deleted a bunch of extremely popular fanfic communities. People lost their minds, and the whole thing was called "Strikethrough" (because this is how deleted accts look on LJ). LJ relented eventually, but the damage was done and LJ as a platform started to die (Except for some hard-core sci fi people, GRRM had an LJ with a 2004 default layout well into when GOT was on HBO)
Strikethrough directly led to the formation of Archive of Our Own (AO3), the site that hosts all the filthy fanfiction you could ever want to read, and their parent nonprofit the Organization for Transformative Works (which is actually pretty cool) and the mass exodus to Dreamwidth (an LJ clone, not particularly successful) and the rise of Tumblr.
Why do I mention all of this? Because Aja has been widely mocked for filming themselves trying to burn an LJ shirt and failing during Strikethrough.
Edited to add because my last paragraphs got cut off somehow:
People learned that they could get positive attention for having the "right" opinions, because at the time everyone was so furious about the Sad Puppies and losing their porn. This dovetailed with the Obama campaign being most of these people's first experience with politics and the Obama team's masterful use of social media.
And none of them have grown up since then.
"Around the same time, LiveJournal (the home for teen girls obsessed with fandom pre Tumblr) decided to ban all underage sexual content as a last ditch effort to get more ad revenue, and mass deleted a bunch of extremely popular fanfic communities."
Oh, not just ANY fanfic communities, remember? They banned the SNARRY (Snape/Harry) fanfic communities. xD
More I read about the Harry Potter fandom, the more I'm glad I was too old to be in the thick of it.
Same. I did have a pretty active LiveJournal account but now I can't even remember which groups I was in. I've always felt intimidated by fandom culture because I'm bad at remembering details, and people that identify as fans tend to be obnoxious about shit like that.
And pornish_pixies!
The whole Snarry thing... It started out as a well respected fic writer seeing if they could do it, then turned into teens and 20-somethings fantasizing about banging Alan Rickman through being Harry, thennnn it got really weird.
And this is where I'll drop the HP Snape/Hermione fanfic title "Pawn to Queen" and then excuse myself.
Oh god, was that the one where Voldemort won and gave Hermione to Snape as a slave? Or something else?
Something else but wow, I haven't heard of the one you just described. I almost want to go find that now. I mean, I've read My Immortal and crackfic doesn't get worse/more hilarious than that. The epitome of hilarible.
The drinking game is positively fatal.
This is an excellent quick dive into the weird fandom side of things, thank you.
This is totally tangential, sorry, I just want to complain, but I don't understand why people keep commissioning articles from Aja.
I get it on some level - they get paid for their takes because they have a knack for triggering the "someone is wrong on the internet" button in all kinds of online nerds, and that sparks Engagement, fine, whatever.
(Look, I have a grudge! :) Aja wrote a very stupid article about one of my favorite TV shows a year or so ago. I know that's a petty, petty thing to hold a grudge about, but in my defense, the article was aggressively bad. They certainly aren't the only progressive media critic who engages with a piece of media in the worst possible faith and expects everyone to agree with them that the work is Causing Harm, but I can't take them seriously and it irritates me when I see their work published. Aja in particular has no media literacy, why are they employed as a critic?)
What's the offending article? Please link!
https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/21509362/netflix-midnight-mass-mike-flanagan-horror-religion
Look, we can talk about whether anything Flanagan does is "good" or not, but Aja wrote like a thousand words about how this show was too sympathetic to organized religion and largely failed in its critiques of Christianity.
For context, the plot of the TV show in question (this is a literal synopsis, I'm not joking, Flanagan isn't subtle, bless him): Christianity Twists Good People Into Homicidal Monsters, Everyone Dies.
(I know that traditionally, this is where you're supposed to go through an article and explain why it's wrong line by line, but there's almost no point? Aja needed a clickbait Take, so she went with "hmmm. lot of religious imagery in this tv show. don't like that*," when the show in question spent seven hours arguing that religious communities are all about three bad weeks away from going Full Jonestown.)
*yes I know I'm being uncharitable, this is my grudge and I'm allowed!
“Felt erased” in the title
It’s not legit criticism when your take boils down to “this sow didn’t represent me specifically!”
I get that not every writer gets to pick their own titles, and titles are going to be as clickbaity as possible, but yes, that was also very irritating.
(Sorry, I'm beating the dead horse: this is one of Flanagan's nastier and more depressing shows, so ehhhh, are there "heroes"? Arguably not, but one of the more moral and clear headed protagonists is an atheist. There *is* "representation", she just didn't notice it or like it. That's not the same as being "erased," oh my god, I cannot stand the current wave of criticism where, when something doesn't work *for you*, you reverse engineer an acceptable Social Justicy reason for why it's Bad.
Okay! Sorry! I'm done! :D )
My favorite response when people ask if I’ve read the Mortal Instruments series is “I read it when it was the Draco Trilogy.”
Please start a substack, I will read more of this history lesson
Ancillary Justice was SO good. And you are 100% right on SFF fandom. Am just waiting for a new wave to come along now and hoping for something more interesting than the current crop of writers (except for Ada Palmer and Jo Walton who continue to be amazing)
Oh man, I remember the Hugo awards kerfuffle but I didn't realize 'Ancillary Justice' was what pissed people off. I really enjoyed that series. I didn't even realize people considered it 'woke'.
I was directly involved in Racefail, several of my LJ friends have posts in the roundups, but I felt like that comment was already getting far far too long to get into that. And very true wrt rationslist/athiesm+ overlap, but you saw that more on the general SFF side than in female led HP fandom. I don't know anyone within the corner of HP fandom I was heavily involved in (a huge rating comm) who read Eliezer's HP fic, for example.
Elevatorgate was definitely a big topic of conversation, but pretty much no one I knew was actually "in" those spaces.
Tingle saying he'd have Zoe Quinn accept his award if he won the Hugo (for the non-nerds: the Sad Puppies spammed noms for Tingle in order to humiliate the Hugos - Tingle handled it with humor and grace and its why he's so beloved to this day) is where it crosses over into GamerGate.
Zoe Quinn also started making a Chuck Tingle game that was never completed. It, uh, did not look good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofJzavEH12A=
Yeah, I meant "at the time", Tingle's excellent at following the trends. Self IDs as autistic when that became popular, has been hinting that they're trans themselves, probably so they can do a reveal that they're been a woman all along but they ID as a man.
Oh God, if Tingles also one of those DID fraudsters I'll get bingo on my "Fandom weirdos" card
Yeah, I forget how long I was a part of internet fandom and how much stuff I'd assumed people just KNEW until I'll mention something and get blank stares (i.e. "what do you mean you don't know Cassie Claire of YA fame started off writing a Draco/Ginny fanfic triology and got harassed for setting up the equivalent of a GoFundMe to replace a stolen laptop circa 2006?"
Don't forget the plagiarism!
Even when I read a lot of YA I never picked up. Cassandra Claire book because of her bonkers background in Harry Potter fandom
I was thinking the same thing! Except a podcast. I've been seeing some YouTube video essays popping up on some of the journalfen exposés (I just saw one in my recommendations on MsScribe / bad_penny) and I know there is scholarly work on older fandom (Robert Kozinets, the father of Netnography, developed it doing his PhD on Trek usenet).
Honestly, as a qual marketing researcher, I probably have the chops to do it - maybe I should.
I actually had a thought on books -- not on fandom, but It Came From Something Awful does cover that era, and Kill All Normies is more focused on chan culture around the Trump election.
I never got much into fandoms, it always felt too much like organized religion to me. That said, I was fascinated by Larry Correia’s exchange with GRR Martin over the Hugo slates. The lefty “trufans” making the sad puppies point for them by blowing up the Hugos rather than allow conservatives to win and Martin trying to talk them down.
One of the prescient moments foreshadowing our current authoritarian trends.
Charlie Stross has been such a disappointment over the past couple of years. Have you tried reading any of his most recent Laundry novels?
Sorry for the tangent, but I just recently started getting into the Laundry Files (as in, like, literally just finished "The Atrocity Archives" last week), and your comment makes me wonder if there's some point in the list of titles that you would recommend stopping.
I missed the Laundry Files restarting and downloaded his two new ones last year. Christ. The first book has a trans character (a FTM teenager) which I rolled with, but in the second book he specifically depicts Mumsnet as colluding with the weird American religious cult on human sacrifices.
Yes Charlie you plonker, British mothers worried about the suitability of self ID and paediatric sex change are definitely just exactly like an authoritarian US Christian right. It’s just a bit rich coming from the man who wrote Equoid, y’know.
My favorite part of the blocked and reported podcast is when katie makes a joke about pronouns and jesse gets extremely nervous and immediately changes the subject
Jesse and Katie should stop using pronouns for these people and just use proper nouns.
See the recent Paulson article in NYT (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/01/theater/tonys-justin-david-sullivan-and-juliet.html). 2nd paragraph: "The performer, Justin David Sullivan, is trans nonbinary and uses the pronouns he, she and they."
The author never again refers to Justin with a pronoun. Why?
Pronouns obviously make no sense in this context. Imagine trying to read an article that refers to a single person as he, she, and they. No chance you could follow along.
'They' is almost impossible to follow along with when you talk about a single, known person in relation to other people. 'Themselves' sounds like parody. Just revoke their pronouns already.
> 'They' is almost impossible to follow along with when you talk about a single, known person in relation to other people. 'Themselves' sounds like parody. Just revoke their pronouns already.
Right! And the activists who screech "But 'they' has been used as a singular pronoun for centuries!" aren't being truthful.
It has been used for an unknown person. "I'd like to find the owner of this lost glove so I can return it to them" but *never* for a known person "If you see Mary ask them to shut up" and is confusing.
I'd happily refer to a person a consistent set of pronouns -- either he/him or she/her-- based on his or her preference. But I won't use made-up words or grammatical nonsense. Hurts my brain too much.
Agree that they should never be used in a news article to refer to a single person, it’s entirely too confusing. But in spoken conversation it’s easier to follow along and doesn’t really bother me.
Man that times article hurt my brain. Two honest questions: If someone uses all pronouns does that mean you can never misgender them? Or do you have to know which one they’re currently feeling? And isn’t trans nonbinary oxymoronic? I thought I was keeping up with this stuff but then another curveball comes my way
This is why after 20 years I don't subscribe ($ goes to BRpod) or read the NYT anymore. How can you possibly believe ANYTHING from a "news" source that writes this headline: "She killed two women. At 83, she is charged with killing a third" about a MALE serial killer?
Same.
That Hogwarts Legacy is already poised to become one of the best-selling games of all time tells you all you need to know how important these drama microcells are in the end.
As for Armie, he's obviously a next-level sex weirdo but the utter destruction of his career seems far out of line with what he actually did.
Right? He didn't assault anyone, or blackmail anyone--he was a kinky asshole without regard for women. Why is that news?
Didn't Anne Helen Peterson write some article about him back in the day about how only in the cisheteropatriarchal Hollywood system could Armie Hammer get so many chances to "happen?" It seems like he was a target because of some interpersonal beefs unrelated to the fact that he's a shitty romantic/sexual partner.
I also remember that when Call Me by Your Name was out there was this obnoxious discourse about whether Hammer's character was a sexual predator because Timothee Chalemet's character was only 17. A sneak preview of things to come.
I think you've placed your finger on it. Armie Hammer is the kind of guy it's easy for woke types to despise--white, male, born of privilege--and he didn't become A Good Guy to diffuse that antipathy. He just enjoyed the benefits of success, and for that he could not be forgiven.
I used to read Petersen regularly (we both got our PhDs from same program) but I’ve stopped (and told her so) after an insane interview with some awful English professor writing word salad about intersectional identities. Anyway, IIRC her Armie Hammer piece was snotty and snobby--as if there were something uniquely bad about him, rather than that he just didn’t get lucky with most of the movies he was in. I’m realizing that today I probably hate everything that I used to think was good. 🤷🏻♀️
What makes me sad (and exasperated) is that thousands of Rowling's fans have been led to believe that the author of their beloved franchise hates them.
And it's not even true.
They're only hurting themselves.
Who..gives a shit. Ernest Hemingway was such a misogynist. Still a great writer. .
Yeah, except that whatever bad things are said of JK aren't true. The fans really are just hurting themselves! It's pathetic, but also I do feel bad for those who have such an external locus of control.
Well. JK Rowling does not believe trans women really are women. If you truly believe that trans women are women; and to believe otherwise is transphobic; in that sense; she is
In my heart of hearts, I think that's a fucking stupid-ass way of determining transphobia.
In polite society, I might say that such an approach is impractical, and maybe offer examples why I think so.
Transphobia: fear of the trans mob
British Ron DeSantis is clearly George Santos’ drag persona, namely: Ronda Santos.
We need to wave goodbye to Jared O’Mara MP, banged up for four years this week. He forged £40,000 of expense payments to a made-up “Autism consultancy” he gave the address of a branch of McDonalds so he could pay off his coke dealer. He’d have got away with it, if he hadn’t been a Corbynite MP with a history of calling women ugly slags on Twitter.
Why do the Brits always have the best scandals?
Centuries of practise.
The best bit of his story is that voters preferred him to Nick Clegg, now head of global PR at Meta. Master of the Universe, if no longer of Sheffield Hallam.
Isn’t that because the voters of Sheffield Hallam are mainly students, who are still pissed at Nick over tuition fees?
Paying off your coke dealer at McDonalds seems pretty normal.
This needs more likes.
Whatever I think of the Rowling controversies in particular, I can't help but empathize with HP fans somewhat because I get it. I was a little too old to be all in on Harry Potter, but I was just the right age to be all in on the Whedonverse. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was just as important to me as a teenager as Harry Potter was to some younger millennials. The fall of Joss Whedon was sad, but if one watched season 4 and 5 of Angel at all, not surprising. Even back then I could tell that someone had it out for Charisma Carpenter.
I understand the urge to write Whedon out of Buffy lore, but to me that's immature. He may be a real life version of Angelus without David Boreanaz's good looks, but that terribleness was part of the person who created one of, however flawed, the richest best pieces of pop culture that ever existed. You can say all you want that without the rest of the writing team (Marti Noxon, David Fury, etc.) and actors (Sarah Michelle Gellar, Anthony Stewart Head, James Marsters, etc.) the Whedonverse shows wouldn't have been as great as they were and no argument there. But they wouldn't exist period without Joss Whedon.
Growing up is accepting that people you don't agree with, even those who have beliefs or behaviors you find repugnant, will create work that is good and meaningful to you. It's not "separating the art from the artist" as it's understood on the Internet - sticking your hands in your ears and pretending that imagining the world without its creator is a viable choice. It's accepting that people are multifaceted, that bad people can create good art, art that resonates with you without you being a bad person.
If what you learn about the artist retroactively makes everything you enjoyed retroactively poisonous and you have to disown it. For me, that was anything related to Marion Zimmer Bradley and her Mists of Avalon saga. But in that case, the thing to do is forgive yourself for not knowing, disconnect from the fandom and leave it behind. If your connection to a fandom is so intense as to be a load-bearing part of your personality that you can't let it go even if its creator is a someone you find odious...well that's a much bigger problem than said creator's problematic views or actions.
Fair points, though the big difference here is that JKR legitimately did nothing wrong and hasn't had a "fall" by any means.
Oh I'm not saying Rowling did anything near what Joss Whedon did. I just used the Whedon example to show how I handled learning that a formative piece of pop culture for me was created by someone I find distasteful.
I don't think Rowling has done anything distasteful. Whedon . . . not so sure about him either.
As far as I'm concerned the only thing both Whedon and Rowling have done wrong that I'm sure of (since its all questionable accusations by motivated agents anyway) is to subscribe to the woke ideology until their frothing comrades came for them too. Both Whedon and Rowling got what they'd given to others many times. I say this as someone who loves the Whedonverse and thinks HP is incredible. They lived by the sword and "died" by the same.
Could you show me, or tell me, where JK Rowling was woke and has 'given to others many times'? I'm really not sure what you are referring to. She did donate to the Labour Party, but many non-wokes do that. She has set up a women's rape crisis centre, and has a children's charity, she has rescued Afghani women and children. She is a personal hero of mine, but maybe we shouldn't have heroes and if you can show how she's lived by the sword I will change my mind. As for Whedon, I'm a huge Buffy fan and always will be and no matter what Whedon's done, I'll always thank him for giving me the Buffyverse.
Sure, both Whedon and Rowling have invoked “the patriarchy” and made accusations of bigotry against (generally conservatives) those they considered opponents.
I love both of their creative worlds but their personal politics have always been hypocritical and the victim ideology weaponized against them is the same ideology they have weaponized against others.
I have some sympathy for what was done to them but, ideologically speaking, they're reaping what they’ve sown.
There's so much cognative dissonance about this in SFF - as an adult I got into Star Trek, and if you know anything about Roddenberry or Rick Berman (showrunner during 90s Trek), there are massive skeletons in that closet. Horrific things happened on set. Female talent was treated terribly.
Somehow they can handwave that and continue to consume and consume, but not JKR's wrongthink.
(They've also conveniently forgotten George Takei's run as a dirty old man on Howard Stern, which is fucking hilarious.)
Fuck you, Rick Berman!
I heard stories but never knew the details. Maybe we're lucky that Gene Roddenberry was not alive for Twitter.
OMG my husband likes Howard Stern and years ago we had Sirius Radio just to listen to it... so I heard a fair share of shows back then (2002/3) but was never a fan. I still cringe when I remember some of the things that I heard... I think there was a trans-identified male and one of the other people in the show's orbit slept with "her," or I'm mixing up stories and HOLY SHIT why is this taking up space in my brain?
I don't like fantasy novels so I just looked up the Marion Zimmer Bradley story and holy shit! I don't know how I hadn't heard about that before now.
Well said. For me the unviable artist is Eric Gill, but I think we all have our deal breakers.
Never heard of Eric Gill. Looked him up. Wish I still never heard of Eric Gill.
John Kricfalusi. I still sing the log song occasionally.
"If you want to die, or at least wish you were dead." I love the way Primos turn a phrase here.
I'll pass on looking it up. I had the misfortune today of looking at some TIM whose Twitter is just him jerking off in women's spaces for like 3 seconds and I wanted to put hand sanitizer on my eyes. (I've seen those types of videos before but they were in clips collected by gender criticals, and they at least blurred out the ladydique & lady balls.)
Oh god I might have seen this too on Thursday - there was a blurred version but a quick click through to the original creator's Twitter was, like, UGH. I woke up Friday morning with one eye crusted shut; it might well have been in self-defense.
Ugh, I looked it up. It's just childishness. The works you love were sometimes by created by people you don't love, or may even loathe. Either accept it or give up the art and the artist altogether.
'Black trans sex workers are victimized by violence at a rate almost as high as that of black men.' Is that true? If it is, how do black men just not instantly turn into the Joker when they learn this. According to that statistic a black man would actually REDUCE their chance of being victimized by violence by transitioning and taking up sex work, but suddenly everyone online would actually care about it.
So...a black man who larps as a woman has the same statistical chance of being murdered as a black man who doesn't larp as a woman? QUEL SURPRISE. It's almost like...um....
Just wanted to pop in and let Jesse know that although Katie didn't catch his Big Lebowski reference, I got it and appreciated it
Right? Totally throwaway line gold.
The problem I keep having re: Hogwarts Legacy discourse is that I am addicted to reading insane opinions about it but also people are now posting spoilers all over the place, and I haven’t even decided if I want to eventually play the game or not (I have a lot of other games I want to play already and I’m currently in a long-term polyamorous relationship with both Fortnite and Final Fantasy XIV).
Anyway, there’s a YouTuber named Jessie Earl (https://twitter.com/jessiegender) who has made several bad faith videos about J.K. Rowling (including a recent one that clocks in at 3.5 hours), and she has been tweeting a bunch about how playing the game means that you’re not an ally to the trans community. She has hypothesized that the game’s enormous financial success is evidence of transphobia as opposed to, I dunno, people wanting to play a game based on one of the most popular franchises in the world. J.K. Rowling actually mentioned Jessie in a tweet back in December responding to some of her criticisms, which has only served to further Jessie’s victimhood narrative (https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1604180531155017731?s=20&t=3_OyAa97goaVgBpQJ_B6lg). I just find her to be a good example of the toxicity and lack of self-awareness present in this discourse.
I think ultimately the real dilemma with the J.K. Situation is that you have an entire community of people who have come to believe (under somewhat dubious pretenses) that Rowling represents an existential threat and there is nothing that can be done to convince them otherwise, because if you dare to suggest that she’s not evil, you are then also viewed as a bigot and will no longer be listened to. That being said, I did talk to a normie friend the other day who is not very online, and he too has noticed a lot of the insanity regarding “woke” stuff. I mentioned to him that I don’t think J.K. Rowling is really as bad as some make her out to be and he agreed with me. So it’s just important to remember that people on the Internet are insane, and that the best thing you can do is interact with people who are not extremely online.
I'm convinced that only about 10% of the anger at Rowling is over what she has actually said and the other 90% is impotent rage over the fact that she was marked for destruction, but is still beloved and powerful, and no amount of cringy NY Times ads or YouTube auto-da-fés can change that.
It's about using her as an example to show others the cost of speaking out. It teaches people to self-censor, to automatically not even expose themselves to information that goes against what their peer environment believes lest their opinion start to change, because the consequences would be too severe.
I wish I could give you an additional like for using auto-da-fés in a sentence. So rarely see it used these days and it should really be more common parlance, all things considered.
Since two people have said it so far, I feel obliged to remind everyone that the plural of "auto-da-fé" is "autos-da-fé," like attorneys general or courts martial.
J.K. Rowling literally murdered my entire family. Your comment downplaying her evil has caused me irreparable psychic harm, and will lead to countless black trans deaths, probably.
Well she did write those dull books that inspired even duller films. Everything she’s done since has been spot-on, to be fair.
That literally murdered me.
Three episodes in one week! The powers that be have heard our whining about January ;)
They are trying to catch up to their senior podcast, the Fifth Column. Those boys churn out shows like it is their job.
Good one. But to be fair, the Fifth Column guys do a lot more "news and politics" than most heterodox podcasters, so there is always interesting content. They could do a show 4-5 days a week without getting stale.
I'd love that, but I don't want the gentlemen to die of liver failure.
Very true, though I think BarPod has the market cornered on "crazy woke people ruin a business." I sincerely hope they do the one about the Anti-Racist Educator who got cancelled by his woke, Anti-Racist students.
I also really enjoy Katie’s exposés of lying internet grifters. She mentioned ages ago that she couldn’t find a topic for a book, but I reckon she could do a Jon Ronson-esque deep dive into why people lie on the internet for clout/oppression points
Yeah and she would be willing to pull LESS punches than Ronson does.
I am glad to see K&J being very prolific. I am not so glad that a huge chunk of the content is still about trans issues. I've personally developed trans fatigue; but I know many other subscribers enjoy it.
A mixed blessing, I suppose.
For some reason, I still subscribe to Wired. And predictably, it panned the Harry Potter game:
https://www.wired.com/review/hogwarts-legacy-review/
In a odd deflection, Wired says the game is antisemitic, because it refers to a global organization that secretly runs the world and enslaves people. Admittedly, this does move my whiskers a bit: Nobody's anti-semetic-dar is sharper than mine. But since Conde Nasty has said many a blatent anti-semitic thing in their magazines (usually under the guise of "we're just critical of Israel!") I think this critique is disingenuous.
The reviewer concluded: "it's definitely not worth it unless your goal is to cause harm."
I'm old and haven't played a video game since Pong. I'm thinking of buying this one.
I've always found it so odd that the left's antisemitism is so consequence free, under their own social justice BS rules especially. Now, its not to say that legit criticism of Israel can't be leveled, even of the "sinister cabal" variety. Mearsheimer and Walt's The Israel Lobby is a good example. Still, when the left hammers Israel on human rights those same critics are deafeningly silent when it's Saudi Arabia, Venezuela or even the Philippines.
For me, the most striking thing, especially among tech & gaming social justice hypocrites is that their entire industry is built on slave children mining in the DRC and sweatshop labor in China and they all have shockingly little to say on the subject and certainly won't "boycott" the products of slavery.
So, for some tech "journalist" to talk about a game causing "harm" is just hysterical. The arbitrary nature of their "morality" and deliberate ignorance continues to floor me.
It. Is fascinating how there is rightfully a lot of indignation about horrible violations in the West Bank. But silence on China.
I think what is going on is that right now white people do evil things. Jews are white. Israel is a white country and they are harming brown people
China -;they are all POC. It is not as bad.
I also think and I have said this before that anti semitism has been around for thousands of years. It does not just disappear. And while plenty of anti Zionism is not anti semitism; it is very easy to hide anti semitism behind anti Zionism.
But there is very little nuance about any of this. Like in NYC; pretty much all the anti Asian hate crimes were done by black people. Which is evidence of white supremacy.
I mean. What is the right anti racist queer take if say in Times Square a straight Palestinian man spits on an Israeli trans woman? What if the Israeli is the child of Syrian immigrants? A black gay woman is bothered by a white trans woman?
Can't help but think of Eddie Izzard, on mass murderers:
https://youtu.be/Bk_pHZmn5QM
A much better parallel to the West Bank would be Northern Ireland. There's even been a comparable number of deaths! (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Troubles )
Would I get anywhere at Apple or even be taken seriously by anyone if I stood up at a company meeting and demanded Apple close its Picadilly Circus store?
Buut. Hasn't Northern Ireland declared peace?
Though I agrre if the conflict were still going on it would be a good comparison.
Peace is very tenuous: See https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/03/world/europe/northern-ireland-brexit-catholic-protestant.html
I spend a fair amount of time in Belfast and the West Bank, and the similarities are striking. For example, there are walls between neighborhoods, sometimes block by block. Loyalist streets have British flags flying on every house. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_lines
Fair enough.
Here's an example of the Left's arbitrary morality:
The very same "activist women" at Apple, including "Janneke Parrish" who demanded that Apple pull operations out of Texas "because abortion" (see https://fortune.com/2021/11/17/apple-worker-settlement-nlrb-complaint/ ) also demanded that Apple pull out of Israel and support the "Palestinians" (see https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/20/22446059/apple-employees-palestinians-support-internal-letter-tim-cook ). Parrish, the woman making the most noise about Apple in Texas does a lot of Palestine support work (see: http://www.thefocuspull.com/features/divine-intervention/)
Of course, Abortion is illegal in the Palestinian territories. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-womens-day-palestinians/for-palestinian-women-abortion-can-mean-lies-jail-or-worse-idUSKCN0WA1OV
Good for Apple for firing Janneke Parrish. She has no principles. She just likes to make noise.
The only way I can understand that sort of incoherence is as cynical corporate messaging. They hope to catch the ideological unthinking youth by signaling allegiance to conflicting but common social justice bullshit a la BLM, abolish police, etc.
I really highly recommend David Baddiel’s recent book and TV show (channel 4 in the UK) ‘Jews don’t count’ on just this theme .
Don’t know if readers here are aware of the massive chemical spill in Ohio in a place called East Palestine. The news seems remarkably uninterested; it seems to me they would care more if it was actually in Palestine.
It would be front-cover of every international newspaper if there were an environmental disaster of that scale in the West Bank.
"I think it’s because LGBTQIA+ people and genuine allies are some of the best creative minds in the world, and these films and this game were made largely without them."
Definitely buying this game.
Dooooo ittttt. I've been thinking of buying it and I don't even know what a computer game is.
To me, it looks like anti-Rowling people have pivoted to “Antisemitism” as a way to ratchet up their claims that anyone who so much as side-eyes the game supports Literal Genocide. It hasn’t been a subtle shift from “anti-TERF” language to accusations of antisemitism.
What's amusing to me is that the same people who are are the most vocal with with all this gender-spectrum and pronoun mayhem are almost universally virulent anti-semites (thinly disguised as anti-Zionisim).
At this point JK Rowling and everything assciated with her is evil. So anti semitic and racist abd homophobic and transphobic.
Btw if youre a fan of Harry Potter the game is incredible. Clearly a labor of love for the creators. I think it’d lose some of the ~~magic~~ if you’re not a fan but prob would still be fun
Is it anything like Red Dead Redemption? (Ie big open world, lots of quests but also the opportunity to just kick back and explore/wizarding equivalent of flower picking and fishing?)
Yes. That is an accurate description.
I'm mid-40s & had a Nintendo back in the day, but never finished the first Mario Brothers game so clearly I'm #Old, so forgive the stupid questions. Are they streamed? Or do you buy something physical (I said #Old and I meant it)? I noticed the screenshot of the site that outs people for having streamed the game. Are there privacy settings to prevent that?
(Just remembered we had a Wii for a bit, but I can't remember anything else about it.)
1) The game can be bought as a physical copy for some game systems or downloaded onto a computer
2) streaming is a ubiquitous modern game thing where gamers basically Zoom-call screen-sharing while gaming. Game companies support it because it’s basically free advertising and the entire platform called Twitch was built around streaming games.
Yes, people watch people play games, which makes a lot of sense to me as someone who watched my mom play King’s Quest as a child.
Pet peeve: it is not “failing” the trolley problem to say it’s not okay to kill one person to save two, it just means you’re not a strict utilitarian. The whole point is to get at the question of whether it’s okay to cause deaths in order to save others, and there are good reasons we should be nervous about ethics systems that say it would be okay to, say, sacrifice one healthy person if their organs could save n lives.
Anyway the obsession with trolley problems wrt AI is dumb, we should be training self driving cars to avoid running into any pedestrians rather than try to make on-the-fly judgements about which pedestrians are okay to take out.
Yeah, the trolley problem is more complicated than they presented it.
Doing nothing, I.e. not taking active steps to divert the train to kill one instead of two people is perfectly moral. We are not omniscient- at any point outside variables affect outcomes in ways we can’t predict.
My young daughter has started reading Harry Potter and loves it. She keeps trying to get me to read it because "it has comedy and mystery." I'm just waiting for the first left student teacher at school to get on her case about it
The most striking thing to me about the polling on trans issues is that the “trans support” is declining, which is, iirc, not how polling about gay marriage acted (it was strikingly uphill). It reminds me a bit of abortion, which is... an unpleasant thought. (Trans culture war for 30 years... shudder.)
After hearing the Armie Hammer story (and this is the first I heard of it, because I don't tend to follow actor drama), I believe he really did psychologically abuse those women. Having experienced psychological abuse myself, this thought even crossed my mind before it was explicitly brought up. The very nature of psychological abuse is that it's insidious, and it blurs the lines between what's consensual and what's not.
And psychological abuse within a "kinky" relationship can make for a very dangerous combination. I know someone who ended up permanently disabled from repeated "kinky" sex with their narcissist "dom" partner. Add to that, the fact that sadomasochistic sexual desires often have a deep dark psychological component, leading many people to choose this lifestyle for unhealthy reasons, and it becomes very easy for someone to get very badly hurt--at least psychologically, if not also physically.
I'm not saying this is as bad as if Armie had literally committed violent rape in the way that the "Me Too" narrative was describing. But it's still pretty serious.
These kinds of issues are why many radical feminists are "anti-kink." Because it can become very unhealthy. Personally I don't think the solution is to try and "kink-shame" people out of it, but I do think these issues should be allowed to be discussed.
Glad to see someone in the comments with more of a nuanced take. Katie and Jessie, I’ve noticed, seem kink positive to a fault. Just because someone is engaging in “kink” does not mean they are mentally healthy or mature enough to understand the long term repercussions of their actions. These women may have falsely accused Armie of rape (inexcusable) but I do not think he is completely innocent of manipulation. Those kinds of sexual fantasies can be very damaging if you drag other people into them. I hope to see more conversations moving forward which acknowledge kink as something potentially harmful. Too often kink culture is used as a shield to excuse violent, degrading and misogynistic behavior.
But...DID he drag them into it? Or were they into it too? Or did they pretend to be into it because they wanted him to like him? Or did he nag them into doing it?
If you read the article it’s really clear that they were into it. Like, already a Dungeon Mistress into it. He joined a ‘community’.
I haven't read it's and if that Iis the case I not sure where there is any abuse.
I also think that in this instance, the kink in question is so off-putting that it hurts Hammer's image and appeal, regardless of the other allegations. Even if his relationships with these women represented the platonic ideal of abuse-free, consent-based kink . . . knowing that he fantasizes about eating women's ribs is just too much. It's weird, it's disturbing, it's kind of gross, and it makes it harder to view him as a romantic lead. Maybe I am engaging in kink shaming, but I suspect that many people (most people?) would have a similar reaction.