Private Eye gets it
The full image:
That’s the Chair of the Society of Authors, Joanne Harris, saying
People with power, money and influence do not experience the same effect from online abuse as those with less power. That doesn’t mean we should approve of abuse. But ‘silencing’ a person in power doesn’t actually silence anything.
So there, JK Rowling. You’ve had success and money from your books (even though you’ve given away a lot of the money), so abusing you online doesn’t actually silence anything. Good news, yeh?
Joanne Harris seems to think Amanda Craig is somehow responsible for what Private Eye wrote.
But Joanne Harris has power, money and influence, so she shouldn’t mind about dogpiling, right? Isn’t that how it works?
“Thanks for the dogpile” while endorsing, or not opposing a dogpile on Rowling. So precious.
The claim that “silencing a person in power doesn’t really silence anything” is atrocious, because I know that it silences other women who are seeing what Rowling is being subjected to. Even worse, it’s making Joanne Harris acquiesce to it as a captive herself to the vitriol.
This is similar to “you haven’t been “cancelled’ if I can still hear you complaining” which, when you think about it, is suspiciously similar to a ‘Dear Muslima’ argument.
“Oh, poor you, receiving death threats, losing business, and having honors taken away. I’ll have to tell some prisoner whisked away by a totalitarian State in the dead of night and chained to a dungeon wall for 10 years about it, so they can cry for you.”
Huge pet peeve of mine, always has been. When I was suffering from such severe depression that I attempted suicide, people would say, well, look at X. They are in worse shape than you are. They have more reason to be depressed, and they aren’t whining. Never mind that depression is a disease, and that the person saying that almost never had any clue whether I had more problems than X or not (some of the problems of X were actually quite trivial, but built up to be bigger so the person could make the argument that X had it worse).
Same with the constant dismissive phrase “first world problems”. There are some thing that can, and should, be dismissed this way, but it is used to dismiss real problems which, while pertaining mostly to people in the first world, are still nonetheless problems, and my dealing with my “first world problems” does not prevent people from dealing with other problems pertaining to individuals living outside the ‘first world’.
My mother used to tell me I should eat my green beans because children were starving in Africa. I offered to send them my green beans if she would give me their address; she never told me that again. My eating my green beans (nastiest food) would not solve the problem of children starving in Africa. My sucking it up and not being depressed (I was willing to, if I only knew how; I still don’t, I still suffer, but right now I am not suicidal) would not solve X’s problems. And my problems were still problems, just as JKR receiving death and rape threats is still bad even if someone else is in prison in a totalitarian state.
“My mother used to tell me I should eat my green beans because children were starving in Africa. I offered to send them my green beans if she would give me their address; she never told me that again.”
Heh. My father used the more dramatic version “they’d give an arm and a leg for what you’re leaving on your plate.” I said, “ok, let’s send this food, and have them mail back the arm and leg.”
Screechy, I suspect neither of our parents thought it was easy being our parents.