Rowling, transgender, conspiracy theories

Jk Rowling came into the public eye again a few weeks ago. This time, not because she has a new release or a new Harry Potter series, but because her views on gender have angered many on the left to face cancellation.

The conflict between JK Rowling and the trans left goes back to 2019. A British female researcher has been fired from her institution for speaking out about gender differences. Rowling objected, saying what the hell was going on with a woman getting fired just because she said gender was objective. Her remarks have drawn criticism from many on the left, and attempts have been made to label her anti-trans. On June 6, 2020, the conflict escalated again. Rowling expressed dissatisfaction with an article titled "Post-COVID, Creating a Better World for Menstruating," arguing that women should be used directly instead of the eccentric term "menstruating." Unsurprisingly, the speech was immediately slammed by left-wing transgender groups, who see Rowling as an anti-trans and radical feminist (terf). Since then, Rowling has been in constant confrontation with left-wing transgender groups, with Rowling continuing to express her views on gender while left-wing transgender people attack her with verbal abuse and personal attacks. This time, the event came into the limelight again because Rowling didn't show up at the Harry Potter 20 Years Reunion event, in other words, she was canceled.

Rowling's distaste for the phrase "menstruating" is understandable. As an active and active Twitter feminist, there's no way she could have endured "menstrual men", a woman who uses a biological phenomenon to describe women and who feminists have spent decades building The three-dimensional image is recompressed into a narrow physiological description. The phrase "menstruating" is as much a humiliation to feminists as "one who has a womb" or "one who gives birth." It is impossible for Rowling to give up her adherence to women's rights and cater to the constantly updated political correctness, which is the bottom line of feminists. And the price of violating political correctness is the fate of being cancelled.

Lin Santu's Justification for Cancellation Culture

Although the dangers of cancel culture are recognized by both the right and some left, Mr. Lin Sandu wants to defend cancel culture. He first said that the act of canceling culture has already existed, but at that time people didn't call it cancel culture. For this he gave an example

After 2003, George W. Bush launched the Iraq War, and the girls from the Southern Chicks Band were all from southern conservative states. Then, when they were on tour, the lead singer picked up the microphone and said that I was ashamed of Bush Jr., Although this young Bush once served as the governor of our state of Texas, I would have been proud of him, but he deceived the American people and encouraged the United States to join the Iraq War with false evidence. shame. As a result, this sentence angered the majority of listeners in conservative states, and then they called the radio media to demand that the southern chick be banned. Because the radio stations that play country music are basically stationed in conservative states, and they are all ardent Bush supporters, everyone unanimously blocks southern chicks. The band immediately disbanded. It was not until maybe ten years later that the group was regrouped. It came back again about two or three years ago. Several of the lead singers got married and had children. After becoming a housewife, they were very depressed. Their children heard on an old record, "Hey mom, you were the home of this girl group back then, why didn't you sing anymore. Then they I just remembered to form a group again. Now it is very successful, of course, because of the earth-shaking changes that have taken place in the United States after more than ten years.

This is of course a very moving story. A band was banned for expressing political views, and it was not until more than ten years later, when the political atmosphere in the United States changed, that it made a comeback with the encouragement of its own children. However, let's not forget that this Mr. Lin Santu has a poor credit record of distorting the facts of the shooting case to justify his arguments. Of course, we need to do some verification of the example he gave.

Southern chicks did speak out against the Iraq war and ashamed of Bush while they were on tour in London, and they did get boycotted by country music listeners. However, they did not disband. In 2004, Southern Chick took part in the vote for change tour of the swing states. In 2005, Southern Chick joined 31 singers to record a music album expressing views in favor of left-wing gender issues. By 2006, Southern Chicks had reached the pinnacle of their careers, winning a Grammy for their album about their journey to being boycotted. It can be seen that the so-called "returning with the encouragement of children for more than ten years after the dissolution" is an outright lie. Once again, Mr. Lin Sandu has falsified the facts to obtain a story that can support his point of view. Mr. Lin Sandu omitted Bush's response to the incident: The Dixie Chicks are free to speak their mind. They can say what they want to say.

When we talk about these distorted and omitted elements and fix and add, we get a story that's not exactly cancel culture. First, the offender is forgiven. Whatever Bush really thinks, at least he is ostensibly in favor of Southern chicks having the right to criticize and deny him. Secondly, the career of the southern chick has reached its peak after the incident. This has a lot to do with the power of the left in the entertainment industry. On the other hand, Rowling, the left-wing transgenders who claimed to be offended by her, do not agree that she has the right to express such views, instead they want her to shut up. And Rowling's career, of course, has been damaged to a certain extent.

Mr. Lin Sandu's defense strategy for cancel culture is to try to equate a general boycott movement with cancel culture painting, claiming that cancel culture is a boycott movement, but with a different name. However, the reason why we use a new term to cancel culture rather than continue to use the old term to boycott the movement is that the two are quite fundamentally different. Due to the development of science and technology (which Mr. Lin Santu will mention later) and changes in the political atmosphere, cancellation culture has more changes in intensity and methods than boycott movements. The development of technology allows people to express their opinions more quickly, and also to receive comments from others more quickly. This means that the verbal humiliation becomes stronger and more frequent for the individual who is removed. In an age of boycotting by phone, the boycotted often had no direct connection to the boycott movement. Now, the social accounts of those who have been canceled can receive thousands or even tens of thousands of attacks and insults in a day. They are forced to face these groups who want to cancel themselves, and cannot be isolated and protected by intermediaries as before. . In terms of means, the difference is equally obvious. Advocates of cancellation culture are not satisfied with just boycotting and canceling the products of the canceled objects. They often go a step further and force the canceled objects to shut up completely or disappear from the public sphere. For example, if a writer is canceled, shouting woke will not be satisfied with not buying or promoting not buying his works, but will further demand that bookstores and libraries remove his books from the shelves and wipe him out completely Willing to give up. Such hateful retaliatory actions often turn into real-life harassment and violence. For example, the U.S. Senate sinema was canceled by shouting devils because it did not agree with Biden’s plan. But since Sinema is in a red state and there is still a certain amount of time before the next election, Shouting Devil did not substantially cancel the law for her. So that sentiment quickly turned into real-life harassment. They stopped sinema at the airport , shouting at her. Shouting outside for harassment while sinema presided over the wedding . Although the owner of the wedding, the mother of the bride, was begging outside the door to ask them to be quiet for a while, but the shouting devil was unmoved. Rowling was similarly harassed. Her golden cement handprints outside Edinburgh City Hall were splattered with red paint and a transgender flag was placed next to them. Three left-wing transgender supporters somehow obtained Rowling's address, ran to her house to protest, and posted the photo online, which was tantamount to exposing her address. These are things that have never been seen in previous boycotts.

left-wing conspiracy theories

The reason why Mr. Lin Sandu first reviewed history and tried to prove that the phenomenon of cancellation has been around for a long time and that cancellation culture is just a new word to describe the old behavior pattern is to elicit the conspiracy theories behind it.

This phenomenon existed before the word appeared. Why didn't we use the word cancel culture before, use ban, boycott. This leads to another question, how did this term cancel culture, this discourse, come into being. How this narrative framework was created. I think the most important reason for this is actually the partisanship in the United States. It's a propaganda machine of the right, looking for a narrative framework to discredit their leftist opponents. I have mentioned in previous columns, for example, the concept of political correctness, which is used by the right to describe some of the practices of the left, but maybe the right itself is also doing it. Like the example of the southern chick, patriotism is the political correctness of the right. They don't describe themselves that way, they just use it to describe the left. After using the word political correctness for a few years, the word slowly fell out of fashion, tired of the word, and saw through the tricks behind the word. At this time, right-wing propaganda machines, such as Fox TV station, seem to want to come up with a new word, continue to stimulate your excitement, and continue to wait for public opinion. The next candidate is cancellation culture. Political correctness is out of fashion, and we start talking about cancellation culture. After you coined this word, you said that you white leftists are engaging in cancel culture every day, and our rightists are the targets of blows. This word should be slowly popular from 14, 15, 16 years. Its popularity gradually surpassed that of political correctness. In the past two years, this term has suddenly become unpopular. Instead, a new term has emerged, criticizing race theory . . . . The right-wing propaganda machine is constantly creating this framework, trying to reshape our generalizations and descriptions of real phenomena.

We are all too familiar with the phrase "It's all A Gongzai's conspiracy". But the more serious problem is that, as can be seen from the narrative of Lin Santu, he is very unclear or pretends to be very unclear about the origin of the term cancel culture. Lin Sandu listed three time points, namely 2014, 2015 and 2016, and pointed out that this is the time when the term cancel culture became popular. However, here we quote from Mr. Zhang Tuomu's article on Cancellation Culture

The term Cancel Culture itself has a short history. Using [Google Trends][2], the term did not enter the Google search thesaurus until November 2017. In just two or three years, its focus has also shifted.

When we open google trends and enter the word cancel culture, we will find that, as Mr. Zhang Tuomu said, even the search volume in 2017 was very low, and the first significant increase would not be until August 2019. Coincidentally, Insider's article How 'cancel culture' quickly became one of the buzziest and most controversial ideas on the internet also took the 2017 view.

"Cancel culture" came into the collective consciousness around 2017, after the idea of "canceling" celebrities for problematic actions or statements became popular.

Also according to an insider survey, before 2018, less than a hundred tweets used the word cancel culture. Among the less than 100 tweets, the most followed is that of author Shanita Hubbard .

Let's talk 'cancel culture.' Personally, I am willing to give a lot of grace to young Black girls simply because the world doesn't.

This tweet has over 6000 likes. Of course, this writer is not a right-wing propaganda agency, as Lin Santu thinks, but on the contrary, she is a left-wing, black woman, and a feminist.

As for "cancellation culture" as a substitute for "political correctness", the argument that the rightists have invented "racial critical theory" when people are tired of "cancellation culture" is even more vulnerable. Through Google Trends, we found that the clear growth of the term cancel culture was from August to September 2019, when its popularity changed from 5 to 16. After that, there are two search peaks for this term, in July 2020 and March 2021, with a popularity of 88 and 100 respectively. That is to say, the most popular time for the word is in March 2021. And if we compare Critical race theory, which is the google trends of racial critical theory, with it, we will find that in September 2020, the popularity of Critical race theory surpassed cancel culture. The explosive growth of critical race theory begins in April 2021 and peaks in June. In September, the popularity of the two became similar again, and then CRT once again opened the gap with the cancellation culture. It can be seen that these two words are not at all what Lin Santu said, the substitution relationship after a word is not popular. On the contrary, the popularity of these two words is very close, and the gap between the two is only one month. It's hard to imagine that the Republican propaganda machine is so capable of coming up with a replacement word in a month, and it's hard to believe that the Republican Party is well-versed in prophecy, with the help of the witch of the South, accurately predicting that the term cancel culture will be When it falls, it is easy to come up with new vocabulary in advance to take over.

What's more, the objects of these two words are actually different.

Criticisms of cancellation culture and counter-arguments to such critiques exist mainly in the left/liberal. Those who criticize cancel culture are the traditional liberals represented by the signers of Harper's open letter and moderates who hold a middle position; the camp of liberals with a radical position on cultural issues is considered to be the main initiator and participant of cancel culture. They have countered these accusations in a number of different ways. - Cancel Culture, Zhang Tuomu

Cancellation culture is a struggle within the left, screaming devils and the traditional left. The CRT is a confrontation between the right wing and the shouting devil. These two kinds of confrontation of different nature obviously have no substitution effect.

Now we finally know why Mr. Lin Sandu moved the popularity of cancel culture to 2014. Why did Mr. Lin Sandu lie that the term cancellation culture, which peaked in popularity in March 2021, has become unpopular in the past two years? Because his conspiracy theory is only valid if cancellation culture starts to catch on in 2014, and goes out of style in 2019, after which CRT catches on.

It is true that we should speculate about others from a well-meaning perspective. But Mr. Lin Sandu, as a doctor of political science from Columbia University and a doctor of law from Yale University, we have a hard time believing that he will not use google trends, and it is also hard to believe that he will not be able to find or understand the English language about the origin of the term cancel culture. report. Combined with his poor past credit history, we have to lean towards a less-than-friendly guess. Mr. Lin Sandu looks down on conspiracy theories and thinks that conspiracy theories are bad, but it is not easy to write conspiracy theories.

Transgender and toilets

In addition to promoting the podcasts he participated in, Mr. Lin Sandu also recommended a WeChat account and an article to understand transgender perspectives. The article, Revisiting Transgender Restrooms and Related Issues , attacks the idea that women don't want to see men in the restroom.

Therefore, the only way to satisfy TERF's demands may be to forcibly check ID cards and genitals. For the former, ordinary people do not have the right to check another person's ID card, which means that in the future, every women's toilet will have to have a police officer with authority on duty, or a machine to scan ID cards; the latter, it is more infringing on ordinary people The right to privacy, whether it's an inspector going to examine everyone's reproductive organs, or some sort of verification machine... these are pretty absurd, difficult to achieve, and highly invasive of privacy.

If the price of banning MTFs from women's restrooms is forcing all cisgender women to have their genitals or ID checked, is this a way to protect cisgender women's rights?

I'm not a feminist, but my thoughts and judgments about performing women in a demeaning and exaggerated manner are unacceptable. If we admit that women and men are not intellectually different, and that women and left-wing transgender groups are not intellectually superior or inferior, then such poor performances are unacceptable and unacceptable.

Anyone with some common sense in the formulation of public policy knows that statutes and rules that prohibit something cannot be 100% prohibitive. We prohibit drug use, but there are still a large number of traffickers and addicts among the people. We ban guns, but Kaohsiung can still have three shootings a week. We prohibit crime, but crimes of all kinds continue to emerge. But aside from shouting the devil, there is no group that would demand the legalization of crime because it cannot be 100% banned. The common sense of legislation is that it is impossible to achieve 100% prohibition. Successful legislation is a balance between cost and prohibition efficiency. The so-called "every women's toilet has a policeman" is obviously a lack of common sense and low female intelligence. Quite the contrary, the rules we operate now are at a balance between cost and efficiency. Who is allowed into the women's restroom is entirely up to the woman who is in the restroom at the time. For people they think are suspicious, they can challenge them in person and ask the other party to show evidence. Of course, it is impossible for this system to stop illegal intruders 100%, but it basically meets the needs of women. More critically, it's low-cost and works. For nearly a hundred years, this system has worked fine. It's true that women are increasingly concerned about transgender break-in, but women's groups aren't demanding more expensive identification methods because of this rising concern. Instead, they are content with the current system, believing that the current system can still give them adequate protection. This laudable female intelligence should not be twisted and mocked by other groups.

Let's just say, if the left still promotes the concept of safe spaces, women's toilets are safe spaces for women. Here, women have absolute dominance. They can set the rules for women's restrooms, and they can decide whether transgender people can enter. Trans toilet issues should focus on building more gender-neutral toilets rather than forcing women to give up their space.

Epilogue

Whether it's the toilet issue or Rowling's insistence on the definition of women, the essence of these issues is a conflict within the left-wing coalition. Women, blacks, Muslims, gays, transgenders, these groups are tied together not because they really have the same interests and demands, but because left-wing theory classifies them as "vulnerable groups". In other words, the left-wing coalition is what they consider to be a coalition of "vulnerable groups". In this alliance, there are certain conflicts between various disadvantaged groups, the most obvious of which are women and transgender groups. From transgender athletes, to whether gender really exists, to toilet issues, the firefight between the two groups is constant and intensifying. For example, a few days ago, the selfish gene author Dawkins publicly announced on Twitter that he had signed a gender-based women's rights declaration, which is obviously a follow-up to the Rowling incident. As for what kind of document this is, you can go to the website to check it yourself, and there are Chinese pdfs available for download.

This is an era of great division. Not only did the left wing and the right wing completely break apart, but there were also signs of division within the left wing. What makes people even more pessimistic is that with the political polarization comes the screaming devil who refuses to communicate and refuses to communicate rationally. They refuse to debate, or they don't actually have the ability to debate. The only thing they are good at is using off-the-shelf tags and repeating them over and over as a means of attack. They forbid hate speech, but the hatred all continues to spread from their stratosphere. They despise religion, but their mode of transmission is no different from religion. They claim to seek freedom, but at the same time force others to live and speak according to their ideas. And the right wing they hate, most of them are still insisting on rationality and persuasion, trying to refute the views of the shouting devil through words. And the rest are stockpiling firearms, believing that bullets are more effective than words against this group.