JK Rowling is now enrolled in the League of Disappointing Authors. Their clubhouse has to be like a Tardis or something to accommodate all of the membership.
I don’t even want to imagine the after-dinner conversation, once they’ve had a little wine and loosened up and find themselves in like-minded company.
I feel like Michael Crichton belongs in this group.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_Fear
Remember when the author of some of the most popular Sci-Fi ever came out as a climate change denier?
No need to imagine, just read the comments section for any Breitbart story.
I love Scenes From a Multiverse. However, I’m loathe to put OSC as a “disappointment” because I thought “Ender’s Game” was completely awful. It wasn’t quite as fascist as Starship Troopers, but it was up there. Apart from it’s other flaws, there was this creepy homoerotic undercurrent – in a book about adolescent boys, let’s remember – which actually kind of made sense when I found out his views on LGBT people.
As for Rowling? Well, what did anyone expect? For the last few decades we’ve exalted the 10 year old boy who scrawls rude pictures on the blackboard as a champion for liberty and have cast any critical evaluation of an idea as censorship. Since she has new books on the way, she needs to start getting her name back into the media and saying something transphobic does that for her. That’s likely all the consideration she’s given what she’s saying. She’s a free speech hero and martyr and that will guarantee free publicity for months.
I must be out of the loop on this one. What did JK Rowling do or say to be a disappointment?
Christoph @4
She confirmed she’s a TERF.
I’m not really sure why this is a surprise. Rowling’s been retweeting TERF garbage for years. Not to mention the way some things were handled in the books themselves, like werewolves being used as allegory for HIV-infected gay men (the “good” werewolf outright states he shouldn’t be allowed around children, the evil werewolf outright preys upon them) or the fact that she took the two most queer-coded characters in the series (Lupin and Tonks) and rammed them together into a heterosexual relationship with absolutely no foreshadowing that they even knew each other existed beforehand.
@cristoph #4:
J K. Rowling tweeted:
Dress however you please.
Call yourself whatever you like.
Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you.
Live your best life in peace and security.
But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real? #IStandWithMaya #ThisIsNotADrill
She was referring to a court case in England where a woman was fired from her job because of gender critical feminist views she expressed online. She sued and lost, partly because she told the judge that she reserved the right to ‘misgender’ people when she thought it relevant.
Larry Niven?
that OSC is a jerk is no surprise I thought ender’s game was very good at depicting abuse and how it makes a “warrior” out of a little kid, kind of the nature of war and soldiering also nationalism. it was very disturbing
I have absolutely no interest in reading or seeing any stories that “glorify” boarding schools
come to think of it those two do share some things; a fondness for the isolation, indoctrination and abuse that characterizes such “schools”
Dickens got it right it ain’t “Mr Chipps”
no surprise they have perverted hateful views about people
uncle frogy
@#7, Sastra:
The details of the court case were significantly worse than that: the woman in question was not fired, but merely did not have her contract renewed after it expired. She deliberately started off small by making a few anti-trans comments, and then expanded her practice until she was making, on average, 150 anti-trans Tweets alone a week. (Keep in mind that if you sleep 8 hours each night, you are only awake for 112 hours a week, so she was making those Tweets more than once an hour on average.) Her coworkers and her employer had already told her they felt uncomfortable with her behavior and asked her to stop doing it, and she refused. And, just to top it all off: her job was public relations, which means that her behavior while on the job could reasonably be construed as representative of company policies.
And, just to top it all off: her job was public relations, which means that her behavior while on the job could reasonably be construed as representative of company policies.
Wait, she was tweeting while at work? I had thought she was just sending a bunch of tweets while off work. If she was tweeting TERFy tweets while at work, that would mean she was creating a hostile work environment, which is pretty definitively a cause for not renewing a contract and really meant she should have been fired long ago.
I was first clued in to JKR’s TERFyness by the good folks at Point Stick, Vent Spleen (their reaction: https://pointstick.wordpress.com/2019/12/20/deniability-is-no-longer-plausible-stand-with-trans-people/). Reading their eviscerations of her various books (especially the transphobia fest that is Silkworm) was quite cathartic after that.
@dianne #11;
I’ve not seen anything which said she was tweeting at work. She was arguing against a proposed change to the UK’s Gender Recognition Act on her own time.
@13: Thanks for clarifying! I think I misinterpreted Vicar’s comment then.
Yup. Disappointing…although not surprising. Her tweet grossly mischaracterizes the nature of the dispute to which she’s referring. Maya Forstater didn’t lose her job for merely stating that “sex is real.” Sex IS real, that’s not controversial as far as I can tell…people have sex chromosomes, they have sexual anatomy, we see sex in tens of thousands of animal and plant species. She lost her job for her beliefs on gender, and her refusal to acknowledge the LEGAL right of an individual to identify as whatever gender they want (which, in practise, means that she violated peoples’ rights by referring to them by the gender pronouns she thought they should be called by, and not the pronouns that they actually used…not by accident, not just once, deliberately and repeatedly). I fully support her contract not being renewed, and would hope that any other organization that has similar issues with an employee would do the same. Freedom of speech should not be an inviolable, absolute right. The judge in this case found that her speech “[created] an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment.” In the UK (and Canada too, plus plenty of other places I’m sure), a company absolutely has the right to fire an employee for this type of behavior. In the US, she probably would have won a judgement against her former employer (I’m Canadian, so I don’t know a lot about American laws, but I do know that the First Amendment is practically sacred – as far as I remember, you have to be calling for violence against someone, or being unduly persistent in speaking at someone who doesn’t want anything to do with you for that speech to invite sanction from the government or an employer).
Rowling is wrong here, plain and simple. It ticks me off that someone whose ideas were so captivating to me as a young person, should feel the need to degrade an entire group of marginalized people by pretending that the sanction in question here was incurred for some kind of innocuous belief/behavior, and not the undeniable transphobia that has actually been displayed by Forstater. Definitely not in the spirit of her novels, anyway. Reminds me a lot of some of Richard Dawkins’ most infamous tweets actually.
@15, the first amendment is not quite sacrosanct. One may not make speech designed to promulgate and continue a criminal conspiracy, that is the crime of conspiracy to commit a crime. One may not make speech designed to cause an immediate public panic, such as “shouting fire in a crowded theater, when a fire is absent”, to use one example provided in a SCOTUS ruling. One may not make speech designed to cause imminent public unrest, that is inciting a riot. One may not make speech in planning the overthrow of the US government, that is sedition. One may not make speech that commands active actions to overthrow the government, that is treason, if witnessed by two witnesses.
There are a handful of other caveats, which I gleefully inform second amendment maniacs that want their own atomic bomb or chemical weapon or similar insanity.
I’m also known to throw water on the fire of idiots proclaiming a state limiting magazine capacities is evil and unconstitutional, by reminding all in the discussion forum about those same individuals previously complaining about federal disrespect of states rights, then ask them which side that they are on, states rights or federal rights only.
And I’m quite firmly on the second amendment pro crowd, with reasonable limits. Want a howitzer and have the money? Cool! Pass essentially the same background check required for a Top Secret security clearance.
Caveat that the most dyed in the wool gun bunny ammosexual fails to realize, each round is also a destructive weapon, with a $200 tax stamp and using it destroys it, destroying evidence of it being destroyed, which the BATFE rather hates.
Back to the topic at hand, I’m known to offend on pronouns, those who know me realize, I have a fair bit of face blindness and my memory isn’t what it once was.
I’m also infamous on reminding the objector to feel free to kick me in the ass, so that perhaps, I’ll manage to get three more brain cells to fire properly and actually remember. Reminding all, said kick could be literal, could merely be verbal, I won’t take offense, but I will apologize for my failings.
@#5, #7: Thanks for clarifying-I just watched Rebecca Watson’s YouTube video on the subject. Rowling is a big disappointment-you’d think someone who’s educated and writes so well would be a little more understanding. I remember one of my favorite lines from Harry Potter, “Soon we’ll have to choose between doing what is right, and what is easy.” She should go reread that.