It's always the loudest few. I've read takes from conservatives in favor of BLM, racial justice, queer rights, etc from conservative principles. The "conservatives" who go feral over any queer representation in media or even discussing reparations probably don't represent the majority numerically, but the silence of the rest (probably out of fear) makes it hard to say they aren't, essentially, representatives.
I try to do right from my "side," but sometimes it's scary when popular checkmarked people on Twitter call for genocides of "red" states, where I happen to live, to thunderous applause.
I personally am entirely fine with queer people (some of my closest relatives and friends are queer), I think that racism is wrong due to many reasons, and certainly I'm totally fine with immigrants because this is how America came to be and later became great.
What I see as troubling is the "cancel culture", the force of the righteous mob. I believe that a society with more justice and grace than we have now can be built entirely without it, and that the intolerant fighters for inclusion and tolerance make the prospects of building such a society weaker.
You can't force people to be just, loving, and caring. You can force them feign that, but I suppose you very well understand how fraught such a society would be. There is a number of historical examples, all sad.
At the risk of self-promotion, I found some cause for empathy for the crusader types when writing about the subject:
"They’re mostly people whose elders, the people who might guide them to a fierce but strategic advocacy, were murdered by police or mob violence, thrown in prison for bullshit reasons, or allowed to die in a plague. If you can bring empathy for the guy who got fired from Google for circulating a paper that made his colleagues uncomfortable, you can bring it for people who are dealing with a strange world with no one to talk to who gets what they’re going through."
This is the part where I'd anticipate a crusader type accusing me of infantalizing people if I were on Twitter. I don't think it's entirely people who have no guidance + people taking up their cause (often without asking), but I think it's a large part of it. Some of it, maybe most of it, is Well-Meaning Allies causing a lot of noise while not listening to the people they're trying to help. I had a cis woman on Twitter lecture me on nonbinary identity because she didn't realize I was describing my own experience. I think that type is what most people get annoyed at, and sometimes their anger/fear has splash damage on people who didn't ask for that help.
Indeed. The fury of revenge is totally understandable, but also not very constructive; it did a lot of sad things throughout history.
The founders of great spiritual movements, Buddha, Christ, Muhammad, all warned against revenge and called for forgiveness (even though Quran calls more to the due process and justice while gospels call to radical forgiveness). This is easy to understand rationally: a society with a lot of revenge keeps killing itself and keeps nurturing cruelty. Such societies tend to not survive for long.
I'm very sorry for all the Black, queer, Jewish, Arabian, East Asian, etc people who were victims of bitter oppression. I adore those of them who struggle for justice, cessation of oppression, peace, and reconciliation with the rest of the society. But I would not join those of them who strive for a war and a revenge.
Fighting against a powerful enemy, it's important to be watchful and not become the enemy's mirror image. I hope the people among them who possess more wisdom and compassion will eventually help most of them choose a better path.
The OP is referring to issus which are faced by LGBTQI rights advocacy. Who do you think they're waging war on? How many people has radical gay rights murdered recently?
Fortunately, LGBTQ struggle is mostly avoids destruction and wounds from either side. Unfortunately, mass street protests very often do not. Even if every participant of such a protest had a very good reason to feel infuriated and destroyed stuff because of that, I say that it's not good for them, it's corrupting them. AFAIK Rosa Parks didn't break a single window.
The lure to use the fury of the crowd gathered for a just cause is always strong for their leaders. Holding this fury back and not allowing it to turn the gathering into a riot is always hard work for those leaders who strive for a non-agressive way to protest.
Perhaps you can name some people who fell victim to "cancel culture" who weren't utterly despicable people. Cancel culture is an utterance that seems to lack a singular clear definition.
When someone tells others to vote with their wallets against something that is contrary to their own interests if a conservative is effected by people's free choice not to associate with him we are told its "cancel culture" likewise when someone hires someone nearly entirely for their image then no longer desires to be associated with their former hire's flagging popularity which is flagging precisely because of their own bad behavior.
In a long winded fashion what she said could reasonably be interpreted as trans women aren't women. While she doesn't support discrimination against people on the basis of being trans she is promoting the same thought process that is pervasively used by individuals justifying discriminating against trans people.
Imagine if someone said its totally wrong to put Jewish people in camps, after all they deserve the same rights as you and I, but maybe they really did cause us to lose WWI...
There are people who really are just mistaken and then there are others who are weaponizing this strategy to minimize their obvious racism.
I think she is merely incorrect not malicious but the reaction is easy to understand and it absolutely has to do with the size of her megaphone not just what she said. Someone who wasn't the world famous author of Harry Potter just wouldn't have got the same reaction in the first place.
JK rowling has a billion dollars and a bright future despite the reaction to her views. Can you give me an example of some people who have actually and in fact been canceled?
Protecting billionaires from people saying mean things about them on twitter doesn't seem like a worthy cause.
"In a long winded fashion what she said could reasonably be interpreted as trans women aren't women."
Wasn't she saying that trans women have a possible biological advantage over non-trans women in performance sports such as weightlifting?
Isn't that a fair question to be asking and within the realm of scientific plausibility?
The frenzied cancel mob attacking her on Twitter was frankly insane. The fact that you need to be a billionaire to survive that and speak (or earnestly question) the truth is not good.
This is not even close to all she said on the topic. I think the biggest issue is her She support of an unapologetic bigot Maya Forstater but that is neither the beginning nor the end of her commentary on the topic and she ended up with her foot firmly planted in her own mouth. She not trans activists is the cause of her own discontent.
I skimmed the article. Is the issue that JK Rowling thinks the terms men and women should refer to sex and not gender? That seems to be the basis for her tweet in support of Maya. Isn't this a widely held view in the general population? I mean, she's neither right nor wrong. Man/woman can refer to either sex or gender depending on the context, and appreciating that is in line with reality.
I think JK Rowling's main point is that trans activists conflate sex and gender and this creates unfair outcomes in areas like sports, not to mention there's a deeply anti-science bent to it (for example denying that trans women have any biological advantages).
For being one of the few cultural mainstream voices speaking against those aspects in particular, despite the vitriol she receives, I think she's brave and I appreciate that.
Some people, not so much you, but people in general who are uncomfortable with the larger sexual identity issues prefer to focus on the woman's sport's angle because its comfortingly simple and avoids the things that make people uncomfortable.
Maya didn't have her contract renewed because she said things like the senior director of Credit Suisse was "a man who likes to express himself part of the week by wearing a dress"
Not for advocating for fairness in woman's sports.
To be clear as far as athletics. Trans people make up 0.5% of the population. The female->male portion is most apt to experience on average a measurable disadvantage while the male->female portion if they start hormones when it is medically advisable to do so wont experience the same clear average advantage as a male athlete who simply declared himself a female one day and switched teams.
> “For the Olympic level, the elite level, I'd say probably two years is more realistic than one year,” said the study's lead author, Dr. Timothy Roberts, a pediatrician and the director of the adolescent medicine training program at Children's Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri. “At one year, the trans women on average still have an advantage over the cis women," he said, referring to cisgender, or nontransgender, women.
> For the first two years after starting hormones, the trans women in their review were able to do 10 percent more pushups and 6 percent more situps than their cisgender female counterparts. After two years, Roberts told NBC News, “they were fairly equivalent to the cisgender women.”
It's a tempest in a teapot. All things being equal you are likely to end up with a small percentage of woman's athletics being trans women and nothing else changes. This is especially true of school athletics which are after all supposed to be for the betterment of the student body as opposed to for objective success.
The science of women's sports performance is more complex than that. For a more complete explanation I recommend listening to this episode of The Real Science of Sport podcast.
Believing "trans women aren't women" isn't "despicable", it's what everyone believed only 50 years ago, and what most people alive still believe. It's not even despicable if they were a minority.
The only reason the phrase TWAW exists is as an ideological counter to "trans women are men". They're really not either one, and saying trans women are women, full stop, is just an indefensible position.
She deserved strong negative feedback on that issues. Given same she doubled down. If you believe trans rights are important then its perfectly logical for example to boycott her books/movies. Which is to say she deserved to be canceled. By which I mean people simply vote with their wallets not to give her any more money. This doesn't infringe on her rights to live her life as she chooses she will just have to do so with less of other people's money.
This is fundamentally a different question from should someone hate her or say hateful things to her. Anything that stirs up strong emotions and reaches millions will result in both reasonable dialogue and insane screeching. The people who reasonably disagree with her can't do anything about the nutjobs nor are they responsible for same.
I disagree, because she doesn't want to strip anyone of any rights. I think people scolding others on these issues could seriously profit from a bit of headwind.
If you cannot be convinced to let people have their standpoints, I am for canceling you. Believe me, I would not enjoy it like you do.
I'd be remiss if I didn't speak up against this sub-thread. I mostly lurk here...but as you can see from my short post history...there was a point in 2019 when I didn't understand what was so wrong -- and SO dehumanizing -- about JK Rowling's actions.
I now see them for the attacks that they are.
Unfortunately...it took overcoming my repression, a lot of soul searching, and a lot of educating myself about all manner of topics in orbit of trans people.
I'm proud to say I'm a trans woman. J.K. Rowling and her hate-mob would like to see a genocide of anyone like me.
If you're earnestly interested in learning more, here's a recent-and-relevant video essay on just that topic.
PLEASE do not be another hate-mob to her, because after all, that's what we're all proclaiming our disgust with in this thread.
I truly wish everyone reading this could see it from my perspective...and I wouldn't wish --on anyone-- the suffering that entails.
Ignorance may well be bliss, but if things had stayed the same, I'd be hating who I turned into. ♥
Edit: Ooh, and for those earnestly edifying themselves, explore "Falsehoods about Gender 1 + 2", found here: https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood#human-identit... -- I think you'll find out the edge cases are far greater in scope than we (even yours truly, previously) presume.
Her opposition to trans rights is enough to term her despicable, her blatant and repeated use of racial, ethnic, and cultural stereotypes in her body if work is also rather bad.
I want to explore a hypothetical to understand your perspective a bit better.
Let's say the only thing she said on the topic was that she thought trans women shouldn't be allowed in competitive women sports because they probably have a biological advantage over non-trans women, or at least that there's insufficient evidence that they do not.
Would this be enough to justify the label of "despicable" in your mind?
No, it's not. But that's a pretty ridiculous hypothetical, very few people who aren't actually transphobic care so much and spend so much time griping about such a miniscule issue.
You keep saying this but that isn't close to the only thing she said on the topic nor was it the genesis of any of the drama surrounding the issue. If you haven't read more on the issue it purely down to ignorance but if you have its not an honest portrayal of the issues.
No, in the first sentence I clearly stated that it was a hypothetical. I wanted to see if that particular subset of what she has said is enough to classify her as "despicable".
Thank you those are some reasonable examples. So in your opinion how do we separate the notion of pulling down legitimate bad apple's and trying to punish thought crime.
They wont call it cancel culture because they were "canceled" by conservatives. Although they experienced substantial fall out for not supporting the Iraq War a move that now looks prescient they ultimately recovered.
They did a world tour in 2016 that sold out stadiums then did the Country Music Awards. In 2019 they released a new album and reportedly sold 33 million albums.
Also the idea that "cancel culture" is even a left-wing thing is laughable.
There is not a week that goes by that a conservative group of some stripe is not calling for the boycott of something or someone. There hasn't been a year that has gone by that this is not the case - anyone who grew up in the 90s would remember that this was generically video games in response to every social issue, then specific developers, before that it was comic books. For some reason in the 80s it was the imagined cabal's of Satan worshipers and the very real lives which were ruined by it in an actual way (they went to jail).
"I can't wait for vigilante squads to start gunning journalists down on sight"
2 days later when 5 are killed at the Capitol Gazette
"jk"
Then there was the article he wrote ""Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy" where he argued that the pill made women fat crazy and promiscuous and then declared his birthday "World Patriarchy Day"
Then the time he said that being gay was "a lifestyle choice guaranteed to bring pain and unhappiness." Just reroll as hetrosexual folks!
Then there was the time he said it was OK for sexually mature 13 year olds to have sex with adults then claimed being the victim of sexual abuse made him say it. He also said abuse victims were "whinging selfish brats" for "suddenly" remembering they were abused, and "suddenly" deciding it was a problem, 20 years after the abuse occurred.
How about the fact that he used his tenure at Breitbart to court white supremacists and promote their views.
He was canceled in fact by none other than Breitbart not for this of course but for the pedophile comments which was apparently a bridge too far.
>where he argued that the pill made women fat crazy and promiscuous
I'm not aware of psychological side effects, but weight gain while taking the most common form of birth control pills is expected and normal. At least that's what the doctor told my wife and I.
Milo was basically a professional troll though. His banning was inevitable.
No offense intended, but people like you fed the troll. He obviously didn't believe a damn thing he wrote. You made him everything he became. Also, I would argue that every single person born into this world has made it a worse place. Where man stands, he leaves damage.
Well, he obviously knew where to poke. I think his banning was an overreaction. People could have opted no to listen to him. But he knew what sentiment was moving people, therefore he had quite a following.
give up the "side" and the labels like "conservatives" and "red states". those are cognitive traps.
you'll never be able to reconcile all the beliefs of a "side" with your own, or another side with your "opponents", so are relegated to either paralysis by cognitive dissonance or selective rationality.
most people are generally decent and most people have some odd beliefs and proclivities. that's just life. it's not reducible to some "sides", much less two sides, no matter what the dominant mediopolitical narratives want you to believe.
two sides are chosen by tribal groups like political parties because it simplifies the quest for power. 2 is the lowest common denominator of power, and it's chosen exactly to simplify choices, and neatly bypass the inherent frictions of nuance and humanity. it's done for power, not to realistically represent the world or to cleanly align with your beliefs. instead, each side exerts pressure on you to conform to it (that is, coalescing its own power). in exchange, you get little random hits of dopamine, which is oddly as lopsided as it is surprisingly effective.
It's not the political parties. They're as much victims of this as the rest of us [0].
It's social media, optimising for "engagement". The most engaging content is not the normal, run-of-the-mill commentary from normal people with normal opinions. It's the far-out nut-job stuff that makes you mad. So that's what get prioritised in your feed.
I signed off of Twitter and was able to completely ignore it while being publicly abused on it. I've recently uninstalled Facebook and my rage at the culture wars has subsided noticeably. Now it's just Imgur and HN that spark this. I'm working on getting off here too (unsuccessfully).
The vast majority of people (I think, I have no proof) are not zealots for the cause (any cause). But the self-censorship effect of our society-wide Purity Spiral[1] means that we never hear from them. We hear the worst, most deranged, opinions out there first because human psychology isn't suited to this kind of situation.
I think the answer is to stop optimising for engagement, because we can't hack human psychology.
[0] I can't find it now, but there is a blog post out there explaining how politicians are getting hurt by the increasing extremism. The need to be more extreme than your rivals in your gerrymandered district where any sign of "weakness" or ambiguity can be taken advantage of on social media isn't good for politicians either.
i’m sorry, no, political parties are not victims insofar as they were unaware of those dynamics. political parties aim to amass power and if that requires becoming more extreme, so be it, in the logic of the party in-group, no matter how they lament outwardly.
social media does distort towards the extremes but that’s marginal, only flattening the distribution of opinions, not fundamentally changing the distribution’s shape. the real problem is the mediopolitical machine amplifying certain of those opinions and ignoring others in service of its own pursuit of power.
60% of them believe in imaginary voter fraud and support undemocratically overturning the election. 43% of them would support doing so via a military coup as long as someone else does it and it doesn't overmuch interfere with their beer drinking.
Please note that this is from 2015 long before any claims of election fraud could have been informed by any real concerns. The desire for violent over throw of the government generated the fake election fraud concerns not the other way around.
A former general has a public event where he openly discussed the merits of overthrowing our government like Myanmar.
There is little difference in my mind between Hitlers supporters in the 30s and Trumps supporters in the 2020s and in the modern day Republican party if you aren't a Trump supporter you aren't welcome near anywhere.
If what you call opinions can be broken down into those we have judged true and false, moral and immoral, promoting of peace and justice or liable to breed hate and death why on earth would anyone be expected to tolerate equally the expression of opinions that by their own standards were evil and destructive as those they viewed as good and constructive.
I tolerate your ability to possess either because by no means do I count myself the master of your mind or soul but that doesn't mean that I will tolerate the idea of your opinion running unopposed. Subject to the rules of this forum I will happily call it out.
Perhaps you can tell me what part of what I said was objectively wrong? More than half of your fellows believe that a satanic cabal of pedos has stolen the country and almost half want the military to end democracy in the name of saving it and install a reality TV star.
Who is this "we" doing the judging of true and false? People of good conscience have debated weighty issues like political philosophy for thousands of years. Thinking that one half of the country is good and true and the other is hateful and evil is simplistic and wrong (I would go so far as to say that it is a form of evil.)
50-60% of that shrinking minority espouse beliefs that are crazy, dangerous, or both. Members of that shrinking minority are losing control of this nation and they are taking it badly. With shifting demographics voter suppression and disinformation isn't going to be sufficient to retain control and they are going to choose between violence and irrelevance and I don't think they will willingly choose irrelevance.
To your point, I also am no longer willing to call myself progressive, or even "left-wing"....I don't want to be confused with the youthful, thoughtless, destructive, mob...and I'm a European anarcho-communist, so hopefully that means something. :-P I think in this regard, many, many, many people on both the "right" and "left" are in agreement.
Every time I’m tempted to actually get involved in the left-wing causes I support, I read something like this.
You’re saying there’s no difference between my Mom and Dad, and the Nazis. There’s no difference between my sister and the Nazis. There’s no difference between my in-laws and the Nazis.
Seriously. This is why people hate the Democrats, even though they agree with them in most issues.
I don’t care if we agree on everything. I’d never vote for someone who said the things you just did about my family.
Most of the people are neither heroes nor monsters. The atrocities committed by the Nazis were committed by a minority of the population and ignored or tolerated by the majority of folks like your family.
I am deeply sorry that your family has fallen in line behind evil and hate because they simply cannot tell the difference between evil that tells them what they want to hear and decency that tells them things that make them uncomfortable. For you I hope that their innate quality as human beings enables them someday to see through the con and I hope you continue to love them regardless for the qualities they possess that are good and worthy. I don't hate you and I don't hate your family.
How is that condescension? Odds are, iin Nazi Germany, everyone would have been a passive observer.
If your mom and your dad sincerely believe in the QAnon conspiracy, it doesn't make them inherently inferior people, but yes that's an absolutely abhorrent belief that is impossible not to compare to these situations.
But odds are most of us would be functionally the same by then.
I’m the only family who has heard of QAnon. They have no idea who she is.
You weren’t comparing QAnon supporters to Nazis. You were comparing Trump supporters to Nazis.
> There is little difference in my mind between Hitlers supporters in the 30s and Trumps supporters in the 2020s and in the modern day Republican party if you aren't a Trump supporter you aren't welcome near anywhere.
I try to do right from my "side," but sometimes it's scary when popular checkmarked people on Twitter call for genocides of "red" states, where I happen to live, to thunderous applause.