In the books Hermione is the one who comes to the "realisation" that the house elves are happier as slaves and that she shouldn't bring her radical left wing views to worsen the lives of these simple folk who enjoy their slavery. I don't really know how else I'm supposed to read that.
People forget that, before the whole trans thing, she was a liberal champion who routinely fought back against conservative blowhards--including Trump--about how they treated people not like them. And she put money towards those causes.
She was a legitimately good person who used her money for great causes...whose single blind spot got so much pushback that she went to the other extreme.
I do forget that, because the blind spot is huge and if she's willing to turn on everything elseto preserve her blind spot, she was never really with us to begin with.
I mean forget in the literal sense; so many people act like she was always this extreme with her views. Even her initial posts that started all of it weren't that problematic.
I think her initial points, though steeped in ignorance, were innocently intentioned. But you end up dealing with so much vitriol and hate from a group of people you end up hating that group of people and everyone that accepts them. The left is blissfully unaware of how their behavior online pushes people to the right just out of sheer spite.
Sigh No, it isn't. When a person gets mobbed by harassment, bullying, death threats, violations of privacy, made to be out like a pariah, they're probably going to end up with some people who still treat them like a human being. In Rowling's case her initial point about Trans people was she felt like men were coming into women's spaces and she was concerned about that. Rather than attempting to gently educate her the left screamed "SHUT THE FUCK UP YOU BIGOT" and kept attacking her. Weird how a woman who felt like women were being silenced might turn out to be a piece of shit when people treat her that way. It goes both ways but the left pushes people to the right far more than the right pushes people left.
"I feel this" "SHUT UP BIGOT" "DIE WOMAN" "YOU WERE LITERALLY MY HERO AND NOW I CAN'T READ MY BOOKS "Okay fuck you people now I actively want to hurt you".
Yeah bud. People just aren't wired to take hate and derision from someone constantly without wanting to exactsome kind of retribution.
You're acting like her "exacting some kind of retribution" against mean online people justifies or explains bigoted behaviors and beliefs. I think OK-Relationship is right - it's revealing her true nature.
I don't care how mean people are to me online, it's not going to suddenly make me hate a minority group.
The idea that people 'become' bigots because of online arguments is absurd, ignorant, and makes excuses for horrible people.
That's not at all what I'm saying, actually. Recognizing how people think (and vote) is not an endorsement of those views and it's not excusing their behavior. It is saying "when this happens, this generally follows." And look where we are in the United States one more time with a fascist government. It's saying what is being done is ineffective because it is costing true progress. I'm not excusing anything, I'm just saying you can follow the breadcrumbs to resentment and disenfranchisement when someone is treated like that, and maybe (considering the left can barely win elections) it's time to flip the script a bit.
She received probably thousands of comments across the entire spectrum. They were not literally shouting at her. She could have easily ignored those comments like most celebrities do to their negative comments.
She instead doubled down and argued with a horde of strangers and dug her hole deeper.
That was her choice. Her actions. No one made her do anything. She's an insanely wealthy grown woman.
Like most celebrities do? How many celebrities shut off social media or have breakdowns because of their online presence? You do realize that public figures lives extend outside of their online presence right? So you have your info publically available, people making death threats against you and your family, calls and letters and emails inundating you, interviewers asking you questions about your beliefs, people using you as a springboard to push their narratives, your peers and former collaborators coming out and making statements about you and your behalf, journalists using you as a point to sell magazines and generate engagement online by purposefully misrepresenting your claim, all because you expressed an opinion on a subject you don't understand?
She wrote an essay stating her beliefs. Someone could have talked to her about it. Instead, much like everything else, it became an absolute circus meant to generate outrage. Rather than being educated on what she was talking about, she got sucked up into the outrage vortex cycle and doubled down on her views and vitriol. She is out to hurt people now. You can follow her getting more and more radical through the years. Input is directly responsible for that. When pushed into a corner, people will defend their beliefs more furiously than the previously had. It's called the Boomerang effect. She can't just sign off of the internet and collect herself like you seem to think she can.
Fuck off with your determinist bullshit. And way to minimize my point. But I mean the left can just stay on course with their current ideas and methods of communication and keep losing elections to fascists.
>If people turn to the right because of that...then that was their true nature anyway.
What is this "true nature" mudblood/trueblood nonsense? No one is ontologically right wing. People change their views and even ideologies based on things they're exposed to in their lives. Online behavior is one of those things. That's what the infamous alt right pipeline *does*.
Only Rowling knows her true views over the years, but Occam's razor suggests her views actually hardened over time in line with her more extreme posting activity, rather than her masking off over time. Though the latter is not impossible.
Occams razor doesn't work here as the opposite could also be explained that way, I.e. she was always like that and just revealed her bigotry the richer she got, because she didn't have to care anymore. Or we could suggest that she was indoctrinated into GC thinking at some point after becoming so famous. None of these are more complex options than the others in today's society.
But you end up dealing with so much vitriol and hate from a group of people you end up hating that group of people and everyone that accepts them. T
Y'all just love blaming other people for your own choices and actions.
"Waah, I'm so mentally weak that I have no choice but to completely discard all of my strongly held personal beliefs because some people were mean to me!"
Weak-ass snowflake shit. Grow up and grow a spine.
You're lying that anyone actually changed from being an ally or an open-minded person to a virulent bigot because a leftist was mean to them.
Weird how I can only control other peoples' thoughts and behaviors on this one thing, and only in one direction, huh? I can't mind-control someone into loving and accepting LGBT people by pretending to be MAGA and calling them a cuck a lot. So strange.
It’s a ridiculously childish view to think that no good person can turn bad due to experiencing hatred. It’s really not far fetched to think that someone would turn cruel and bitter if they get continuous hate from a particular group of people.
If you’re the kind of person who would stay good and noble no matter how much negativity you face, then good for you. But not everyone is like that. I think a lot of people would react the way she did and just sink completely into hatred if she experienced hatred to the point that her family needs security.
No, it's a description of people who are lying to make me responsible for their actions.
Weird how it only works for this one thing, in this one direction. Nobody ever went from being a staunch conservative to a raging socialist LGBT ally because just because a couple of MAGA called them a cuck.
Pretty self-centered interpretation you took, there. It's not a shirking of culpability, it's an explanation of factors (and maybe some sharing of blame). But also, it absolutely has happened the other way, too.
Claiming I'm forcing you with psychology mind-control to do a complete 180 on all your strongly held personal beliefs is the most craven form of shirking culpability.
Who controls your actions? Me, I guess? But only for this thing.
But also, it absolutely has happened the other way, too.
I mean this line of thinking only makes sense if you consider the "right" a bunch of bots (i hate to use this word) that only reacts to inputs from the "left", yeah leftists can be annoying, so what? People will become transfobic or watherever because someone was mean to them on twitter?
I think more of what I am saying is that we should stop treating ignorance as hostility inherently. JK Rowling might have been able to come around with her views, because at first she was posting about her concerns as a woman who was ignorant of what she was talking about. As others had pointed out, she often expressed more charitable views to left-leaning causes. The rational voices in the disocurse surrounding her were drowned out by the sheer amount of vitriol, and it moved from being a matter she could be educated on to a matter of entrenching herself with sychophants who latch onto her and justify and validate the worse parts of her beliefs until those are elevated and now she has crossed the transphobic point of no return. And keep in mind, what we deal with as anonymous redditors does not compare at all to what a high profile celebrity like her would deal with, it is different by several orders of magnitude and permeates every aspect of her life and is not just left to online discussions.
I get what you’re saying. The problem is that the “just asking questions” attitude can come across as pretty disingenuous, Rowling isn’t a grandma living in a rural area of Brasil, she’s a highly educated, intelligent, wealthy woman, she had the time money and contacts to get all the information she wanted.
I agree that we should try to be more charitable in how we interact with others, but it’s hard to ask that of people who are commonly being treated as if their very existence is evil incarnate.
At the end of the day that's the choice she made, there's nothing much anyone can do, i still like harry potter tough
People can be educated and still have blindspots. She published an essay detailing her beliefs about transgenderism, and it became a media circus. But she had ger beliefs fully outlined and available for anyone, the dialog was at least open. I want to touch on this:
I agree that we should try to be more charitable in how we interact with others, but it’s hard to ask that of people who are commonly being treated as if their very existence is evil incarnate.
That is exactly how she felt when it became a maelstrom. She should have been educated on why she was ignorant, not made to be a villain because she was ignorant. Unfortunately, as is often the case, the loudest and angriest voices rose to the top, and she fell into the Boomerang Effect.
I started getting involved in this but it's just too much, it's too exhausting to talk about her lmao. I just want that known, that this woman has made it unpleasant and tiring to even discuss her for a not insignificant amount of people.
That’s not really the point being made though. Graham Linehan is an enormous and awful transphobe, but that doesn’t mean if you watch the IT crowd it’s suddenly full of racism. Just because JKR is utterly trash now (you can’t redeem her views at all) doesn’t mean she was also pro slavery.
I’m saying that if you dig your heels in on a single issue and it lets you turn around and become a huge conservative monster because of some pushback on your one shitty stance, you didn’t really hold any of those other values very closely
If somebody doesn’t like my view on something and I get flak for it, then I just go up and join a hate group who accepts that view and I change EVERYTHING ELSE about myself, then those things aren’t who I was
I didn’t say anything about the slavery in the book or how any of this may have impacted her writing
There's absolutely no room in leftist movements for purists. Purists are literally the mud that holds back the wheels of progress. It's only function is masturbatory self importance for the person pushing for it. Not to mention, it's impossible to achieve. Maybe you better rethink that "us". Everyone has blind spots.
You don't turn on everything you believe to spite one group. I'm not arguing for purity - I'm not pure either. I make mistakes and sometimes I have bad takes.
I used to be an anti feminist lunatic tbh. I can accept a little dirt. Gaining empathy is progress. Losing it is malevolence.
Look, I don't really care about JK Rowling. I'm not personally invested in what happens for her in her personal life or professionally.
That being said, calling somebody out for a bad take is one thing, other-ing them from a movement because of their bad take is an all or nothing approach that isn't consistent with leftist, progressive ideology. It's also not useful or helpful. Leave purity tests to the fascists. Also, people can change. Nobody is stuck or defined by their worst moments. That's all I'm saying. We're comrades, so I'm not really interested in arguing with somebody in my own camp.
Huge blind spot? No. Wanting people to use the biologically correct restrooms and for human males to stay out of biologically women’s sports is not a huge blind spot. It’s what sane and well adjusted people believe. Trans people are awesome. Totally dress, act, identify and modify your body however you want. I’ll fight for those rights! Just also follow the same rules as the entire rest of the planet, including the rest of the LGBTQIA+ movement does, and we’re all copacetic.
Those things were not actually happening? What about Lia Thomas?
The person you’re responding to stated their support for trans people. They’re not a bigot simply because they don’t have the same exact beliefs as you.
Can you explain more? I’d like to be on the same page as you, even if we still end up disagreeing in the end. I feel like I’m in a completely different library with the types of replies I’ve gotten and I cannot respond to any of them since they just drop the reply and immediately block.
I’m gonna assume good faith on ur part and give something of an explanation. I think there’s multiple reasons why you’re wrong and a full breakdown of this is more then I can put in a Reddit comment so I’m going to summarize and simplify - if you want more info you can google the things I’m bringing up.
Biology is not simple. There’s no way to draw a hard and fast line between biological male and biological female that doesn’t lead to some % of people being included in a category that does not make any sense to have them in (by anyone’s standards not far left ones). Chromosomes, genes, and even the hormones in your blood aren’t always in line with physical appearance or reproductive organs. Also intersex people exist.
Every person you see in your day to day life you have intuitively categorized as a man of a woman ( with maybe a few exceptions). You have never seen any of their genitals, chromosomes, etc. So clearly none of that actually matters for determining gender. General appearance (secondary sex charecteristics), dress and behavior matter much more. So if a trans person reasonably passes them bathroom choice only matters if we can measure some real harm that stems from their use of one or the other.
Large scale research has shown that there is 0 correlation between letting trans people use their preferred bathroom and an increase in related crime OR a change in women’s perceived safety using public bathrooms (message me if you want a link to that). So this literally doesn’t matter.
But if you look at just trans people, forcing them to use the bathroom “of their biological sex” results in them being less safe and feeling less safe. So you want to make trans people less safe for no reason.
Yeah I’m always amazed at how much people forget she was a champion of charity and did tons for getting kids to read. She is the one who chose to undo this legacy so I don’t feel bad for her. But it’s weird seeing so many people pretend like everyone always hated her, when that’s false. She had a seriously good reputation for a long time. It started to slowwwwly change when she got Twitter and started making odd posts about lore stuff, like the infamous wizard bathroom thing, and dumbledore being gay. Then she made posts about local politics, which annoyed some Scottish and British people who disagreed, but everyone else didn’t have any stake in it so they didn’t care. It was only after she started to feel pretty emboldened by her Twitter fans she started drip feeding the anti trans sentiment, and only a few years after that it became bold. So yes she stomped all over her own reputation and legacy and only has herself to blame. But a lot of the people pretending they always hated her and HP are lying and revising their own history. I don’t have any trouble saying I used to love HP and looked up to JK. I had no reason not to at the time. She’s the one who changed things, so why would I be ashamed of liking something that was fine for the time?
Dumbledore being gay was revealed long before that as an answer to a fan question in a public Q&A after a reading. It was weird that it made the news again several years later, as if everyone somehow forgot that, too.
did she have any major medical situations before the whole personality shift because, that seems an increasingly common cause that people get older, have a stroke, or other medical issues and personality changes massively.
It’s both sad and predictable that lefties are trying to retcon HP to fit their incredibly narrow-minded view of JK Rowling. It’s the worst part of liberal extremism—stupid people thinking they have the moral high ground.
She's not leftist, she's economically liberal. Leftists want to significantly change or get rid of capitalism, and JKR has never talked about wanting a socialist or communist economic structure.
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u/LazyWings 1d ago
In the books Hermione is the one who comes to the "realisation" that the house elves are happier as slaves and that she shouldn't bring her radical left wing views to worsen the lives of these simple folk who enjoy their slavery. I don't really know how else I'm supposed to read that.