David Futrelle has brought back We Hunted the Mammoth! Go read it!
The latest post is about JK Rowling and Graham Linehan. OK, maybe you should run away instead — nothing good can come of those two nitwits. There is a healthy dose of schadenfreude here, though. The TERFs have won a victory in the UK Supreme Court, but they’re still miserable and bitter. Futrelle has a long list of various reactions from fervent anti-trans wackaloons, and they’re all whining about how people hate them so much.
Victoria Smith
@glosswitch
But then when there is hope it also hits you just how awful it is, how much open hatred of women has been enabled, how utterly worthless so many professional, paid ‘feminists’ have been, how they will always say nothing no matter how bad it gets.
Julie Bindel
@bindelj
I feel lower than a snake’s armpit the past couple of days – sending love x
10:36 AM · Apr 20, 2025
They don’t get it. Their critics are not expressing “open hatred” of women, they’re disgusted with this small, loud crowd of haters who succeeded at getting legal approval of their bigotry. We’re repelled by you, not women.
And then there’s Glinner.
Graham Linehan 
@Glinner
“Let it”. It destroyed my family because of the cowardice of my friends, who stood by while a whole generation of gay kids were mutilated and sterilised, and the women who fought it lost their livelihoods. You’re a coward and a fraud
@jonronson
Quote
On a clear day
@ICanSeeForever1
·
Mar 14, 2024
Adam Buxton and Jon Ronson on Graham Linehan
‘I was kind of obsessed with our mutual friend who let it take over his life to the extent that he lost all of his work and his family’
The “it” that destroyed his family is, he thinks, trans people, but really “it” was his pathological obsession with hatred of trans people. Graham Linehan is just a sad pathetic failure of a human being.
Welcome back, David Futrelle. Nothing has changed.
As for Rowling, here’s an accurate assessment from Salon, commenting on her selfie with cigar and liquor.
But no matter how much money you have, you can’t dominate the world if you’re not out in it. In her photo, Rowling is notably posted up on a yacht or some beach resort, enjoying the spoils of her wealth and a strong 5G signal from her cellular provider. She’s not joining the cheering members of For Women Scotland and the other anti-trans voices in person, she’s playing edgelord from the comfort of a life so far removed from reality that the truth is just a speck in the distance. After years spent tarnishing her brand with rampant trans-exclusionary takes, Rowling has assured that her writing won’t define her legacy; her flagrant cowardice will.
Despite what she might say, Rowling isn’t for anyone, especially not women, whom she claims to champion; she’s for herself. The author of a beloved book series about coming together to fight the rise of fascism has written herself into the story as a real-life villain. No matter how much fans try to separate the art from the artist, Rowling and “Harry Potter” are inextricably linked forever. And with the “Hogwarts Legacy” video game and Max’s upcoming “Harry Potter” series trying to breathe new life into the franchise, it’s time for even diehard Potterheads to put their money where their mouths are and leave Rowling’s wizarding world behind for good.
It’s amazing how this group of people who eagerly embraced discrimination and hatred of trans folk have become so wretched, in spite of any wealth and success.
Inevitably, despite the dishonest claim by Judge Lord Hodge that the Supreme Court decision was not a triumph for one group over another, and the bleatings of anti-trans “moderates” hoping that it would produce peace and goodwill, it has given rise to a tidal wave of hatred and contempt for transgender people, all the transhaters taking it as licence to spew their bigotry as much as they like. I’m proud to say my own party, the Scottish Green Party, is standing unequivocally with trans and non-binary people (even the Green Party of England and Wales co-leader, Adrian Ramsay, hedged on Radio 4 this morning).
As a Swedish spectator I make no sense of the result of the court. Is science now to be decided by lawyers? There was a notorious case in USA, I rather liked Spencer Tracy’s role in the film.
Apparently someone asked Starmer about biological women, and he didn’t make the obvious statement that all women, cis or trans, are biological women. No trans person is an artificial life form.
Feels kind of like religious people claiming I’m angry at god when it’s the horrible human being in front of me I’m angry at. It’s a way to pass the buck.
It’s a bit like the Andrews Tate and Jordans Peterson of the world. They never look happy or contented or joyous, never thrilled or relaxed or radiant, just angry and put-upon and resentful. There is no sense of hope or delight or bonhomie about them, just entitled spite and vitriol all the time. It’s a terrible way to live.
Glinner is the ultimate example of the meme of the person putting a stick through the spokes of their bike, then falling off and blaming somebody else. If all you meet are assholes, Glinner, maybe the asshole is you!
I remember when Joanne was considered the “Queen” of Xitter because of how she’d take down Trump. It was glorious and I absolutely loved it!
Then she started doing [gestures vaguely] this, and it absolutely broke me.
I’m embarrassed to admit that I defended her many years ago; so many fundies were swearing that Harry Potter was witchcraft and reading it would corrupt kids and bring them into the occult. I made multiple posts on my old, crappy Blogger site taking issue with Laura Mallory in particular, who was trying to get the books banned in the state of Georgia. (For fun and out of sheer spite, I would hyperlink Mallory’s name with a video from South Park: namely Cartman singing “Kyle’s Mom is a Stupid B*tch (In D Minor)”)
Now Joanne is happy to crawl in bed with those who would refuse to even look at her works.
On the positive side: Whenever we get HP merch at my Costco, it doesn’t sell that well. This past Christmas, our Lego advent calendars didn’t include HP because we couldn’t get rid of them from the previous year.
May she only know irrelevance.
@Autobot #7:
Well, that’s still bullshit. No need to feel bad about that.
I can understand young people enjoying the Harry Potter series, since they lack the cultural baggage needed to see that Rowling stole every single idea in her books from other authors. The sole exception is quidditch, which’ rules are so stupid that they would never make an exciting game in real life.
@Autobot, Nemo:
Yeah, bullshit is still bullshit. Rowling wasn’t so obviously a crackpot earlier in her career, and the people trying to ban the books quite obviously were. In fact, she probably wasn’t as much of a crackpot early in her career; it’s a pretty commonly-seen trajectory of:
– getting used to adulation
– saying something that gets a lot of people going ‘hey, wait a second’
– getting defensive and ignoring the first rule of holes
– deciding to stick with the horrible people who are still providing adulation
@rietplum:
Quidditch wasn’t the only howler in there, though it was one of the more extreme ones. Frankly, just her population numbers didn’t really add up if you looked at them too hard. I’ve been in a number of D&D campaigns with better thought-out backstories and economies.
And there’s something to be said even for stolen ideas as long as they’re well done. They were, at least to start with, entertaining even if you knew what she was ripping off. I suspect part of the problem is that after the books became sensations, and Rowling became full of herself, it got harder for any editor to actually edit her, and as a result the books became less ‘well done’ as the series progressed. Them getting longer and longer is a part of that.
(I read the fifth book. When the sixth book was about to come out, Rowling made a big deal about how one of the major characters, though obviously not Harry, was going to die. Based on the ending of the fifth book I figured out who it was going to be in approximately 0.5 seconds. I read the sixth book and saw that my predictions were indeed correct. I never bothered with the seventh book.)
I’ve never read (and now, obviously, never will) a Harry Potter book, but I did listen to Stephen Fry reading the first one on BBC radio. It was about something (spell, potion…?) being invented that would grant immortality. At the end of the book it was decided (by Dumbledore?) that it should be suppressed. But no-one in the book asked the obvious question: how is it to be prevented from being invented again? From what I’ve read of criticism of her work since, that’s typical of her lazy, slapdash world-building and plot construction. The books seem to be just stereotypical British boarding school stories with added magic – and in my opinion, magic is difficult to do well. Done Rowling style, it’s just an endless source of MacGuffins, of the “In one bound he was free!” variant.
I think I got as far as the third book, but only because my kids were enthusiastic about reading them (I think there was a strong social pressure element to the fanbase — hey, if she can claim all those trans kids are there because of social contagion, how much more likely is that to influence reading habits?) I loathed them. They were so repetitive and so inconsistent — just trot out another magical phenomenon to advance the plot, then discard it so it doesn’t interfere with the next book’s plot. “Time Turners”…right. What schlock.
And then there’s always the idiotic quidditch match. Why? Because British children play cricket, so we need a magical alternative. But the rules make no sense! All that matters to win is one person catching the flying bauble, and it negates all the other scoring. It was also obviously an extraordinarily dangerous game with people zooming about at life-threatening heights and speeds. I figured JK Rowling must just hate children, and wanted a way to kill them.
Ultimately fascists are never happy just being able to make policy. They want everyone to “smile and obey.” It’s not enough that they won the court case: they need everyone else to be happy about it.
That’s why I believe their end-game will be to try putting all trans people (or anyone suspected of being trans) in prison, and using coercive interrogation to try to make trans people say we like that they imprisoned us and we “repent.”
@11
You’re thinking of the Philosopher’s Stone (changed to the Sorcerer’s Stone in the U.S.), and they sorta-kinda bring it up again later. In Book 1, it’s explained that the inventor of the Philosopher’s Stone has been alive for 600 years, but apparently no one has replicated the invention in that time. At the end of Book 1, the stone is destroyed, and the inventor chooses to die rather than create another one.
In Book 6, we learn Voldemort’s ultimate goal is to become immortal, for which he needs horcruxes, the new made-up magic thing for that book that hadn’t been mentioned in Books 1-5. Harry asks Dumbledore why Voldemort doesn’t just make a Philosopher’s Stone (Harry presumes Voldemort is powerful enough to do it), and Dumbledore gives a long-winded non-answer that boils down to “because Voldemort prefers to use horcruxes.”
Of all the nonsensical plot points in the series, the lack of Philosopher’s Stones in the later books is low on my list of concerns.
183231bcb,
What has been invented once can be invented again – particularly if it’s known to have been invented once!
PZ@12,
Ms. KG suffered through the entire series, as our son was just the right age for them. One phrase I recall them laughing at as he gained a little critical distance: “he said dully”. It apparently occurs scores of times over the course of the series. I got lucky as far as magic stories go – Hobbit, LotR and Wizard of Earthsea.
“a beloved book series about coming together to fight the rise of fascism“
The writer may want to check in with Shaun on that one
https://youtu.be/-1iaJWSwUZs?si=cfiFJaDg_mANIVyK
they were always and already wretched miserable people who are only marginally clever enough to gain some notoriety and “success”
having experienced education in a private catholic run schools I was completely turned off by that genera of stories way back with “goodby mister chips” as utter BS with little relation to reality.
Linehan: “… who stood by while a whole generation of gay kids were mutilated and sterilised…”
This fucking twit. By his own fucking twit argument a trans woman who is attracted to women is straight. I just bet he sees a big beefy bald bearded trans guy with his boyfriend and thinks “mm that’s some wholesome heterosexuality right there.”
But, of course, it’s only about trans women. They couldn’t give a microtoss about trans men. They’re the antithesis of feminists.
Richard Dawkins is going full anti trans on facebook.