It was no April Fool’s joke.
Harry Potter author-turned culture warrior J.K. Rowling kicked off the month with an 11-tweet social media thread in which she argued 10 transgender women were men — and dared Scottish police to arrest her.
Rowling’s intervention came as a controversial new Scottish government law, aimed at protecting minority groups from hate crimes, took effect. And it landed amid a fierce debate over both the legal status of transgender people in Scotland and over what actually constitutes a hate crime.
Already the law has generated far more international buzz than is normal for legislation passed by a small nation’s devolved parliament.
i think this has a lot to do with it.
and i think he’s also boosted a lot by the fact that he doesn’t really communicate that many original thoughts. instead, it seems like he tends to blindly agree with whoever he has on camera. so he simultaneously cultivates these personas of “having intellectual curiosity” while also being a stand-in for the average college dorm bro.
(i’m not trying to defend him here, he still causes serious harm by platforming bad actors and endorsing their views.)
I think these are kind of one in the same. College dorm bros, ime, and just your general kind of like libertarian white dude, are pretty vulnerable to JAQing off unintentionally, engaging in a lot of logical fallacies, and priding themselves on a kind of half-baked intellectual curiosity that really just serves to reaffirm their own worldview. It’s how they can square the circle of supporting free speech, and it’s uses, right, while not actually being intellectually curious enough to dig themselves out of their holes through legitimate means. The college dorm bro is closely related to the debate pervert, is basically what I’m saying.
What does “square the circle of supporting free speech” mean in this context?
If I had to guess I reckon you are saying that they delude themselves into believing that they are free speech absolutists but only when it is politically convenient for them - or something like that?
Kinda like that, yeah, but, I think, less when it’s politically convenient, and more just, that it’s like a fundamental character flaw. They wear the coat of free speech, but then they aren’t actually capable of engaging in what I see as legitimate speech or communication, and they’re not capable of engaging with or internalizing outside ideas. They’re not capable of actually using it, basically.
It’s sort of like how, you know, you can support free speech, but then also, most people would end up blocking commercial spam, or like, very blatant trolling. Only the stupidest people would see that as a kind of hypocrisy, because their definition of “speech” doesn’t encompass spam and blatant trolling. Most people would kind of leave it there, but I also think it’s potentially a good idea to block out (hard to distinguish as it is) bad faith communication, under the guise that it’s not actually communication. At least, if not to block it outright, then to ignore it, or maybe, take a different approach to it. Logical fallacies are like intellectual spam, disguised as real thought, to make it harder to distinguish and boost engagement. I don’t qualify that as being like, real speech, basically. So I find it mildly amusing that people who are so vested in free speech are not really capable of using it, basically.
I don’t necessarily think it’s like, bad, that they defend free speech, at least conceptually, right, but I do think it’s terribly ironic that they’ll defend everyone’s ability to do something, but then they have no capacity to engage with it or really use it themselves. My cynical tendency is that they’re realistically not defending real free speech, when they say they’re “supportive of free speech”, but they’re really just defending their own ability to suck down bad faith arguments, conspiracies, bro-culture grindset shit, and maybe even hate speech, from their information pipes.
So, that’s kind of a long-winded way to say that you’re correct, yeah.
Thanks for clarifying!