Of all the things he could have said in response, that’s what he chose. Three words. Nothing about the women’s rally, nor throwing a smoke bomb, nor the hard left threat, nor the link between misogyny and antisemitism, nor those things themselves. I wonder if the “transphobia” he is complaining about is the “misgendering” or the existence of the rally.
The Ogden Nash poem The Purist came to mind yesterday. Another example of someone ignoring horrible things happening to other people to make (rightly or wrongly) an irrelevant semantic point.
Ugh! Such a disappointment; I never did get around to reading Pullman’s “His Dark Materials”, but aren’t Gender Identity Ideologists basically today’s clergy, and wasn’t Pullman putatively anticlerical?
So if someone claims to be trans, you can’t call them out for assault, bad behaviour, anti-semitism, hate crimes against women, just plain being an unpleasant anti-social git? Wow. All this time I’ve wasted. I’m going to go out tomorrow and demand people call me Shirley, and after that all hell is going to get raised.
SB: Less a semantic point, I think, than a point of moralistic identity. What he is apparently saying is: I don’t care whether it’s true, I’m not the sort of person who believes it. Could that be related to his being so allergic to C S Lewis?
The bad guys in Pullman’s novel are mutilating children for ideological reasons, in an attempt to keep them in a state of purity and innocence. They do this by forcibly severing the link between the child and the child’s daemon, a physical manifestation of the child’s soul. This process is so traumatic that the children usually die. It really is galling that Pullman can’t see the parallels.
Oh! Well now I feel stupid for not seeing it. Although the two main characters in the original novels make a decision that results in them being separated from their daemons. I’m trying to avoid spoilers here. It’s not a “there’s no other choice” situation, but the only other option is to abandon the quest. The more recent prequel and sequels feature people who are able to be apart from their daemons. One character does this by choice, as the only way to protect two people at the same time. The others undergo some kind of spiritual rite of passage. I guess the key thing is that it’s a choice (of sorts). I guess I will have to think of the witches of Lyra’s world as non-binary now. How tedious.
… but not antisemitism, evidently. And misogyny is just fine.
“Look what they made him do!”
Of all the things he could have said in response, that’s what he chose. Three words. Nothing about the women’s rally, nor throwing a smoke bomb, nor the hard left threat, nor the link between misogyny and antisemitism, nor those things themselves. I wonder if the “transphobia” he is complaining about is the “misgendering” or the existence of the rally.
The Ogden Nash poem The Purist came to mind yesterday. Another example of someone ignoring horrible things happening to other people to make (rightly or wrongly) an irrelevant semantic point.
Ugh! Such a disappointment; I never did get around to reading Pullman’s “His Dark Materials”, but aren’t Gender Identity Ideologists basically today’s clergy, and wasn’t Pullman putatively anticlerical?
So if someone claims to be trans, you can’t call them out for assault, bad behaviour, anti-semitism, hate crimes against women, just plain being an unpleasant anti-social git? Wow. All this time I’ve wasted. I’m going to go out tomorrow and demand people call me Shirley, and after that all hell is going to get raised.
SB: Less a semantic point, I think, than a point of moralistic identity. What he is apparently saying is: I don’t care whether it’s true, I’m not the sort of person who believes it. Could that be related to his being so allergic to C S Lewis?
The bad guys in Pullman’s novel are mutilating children for ideological reasons, in an attempt to keep them in a state of purity and innocence. They do this by forcibly severing the link between the child and the child’s daemon, a physical manifestation of the child’s soul. This process is so traumatic that the children usually die. It really is galling that Pullman can’t see the parallels.
He must be seeing the parallels as daemon=gender idenniny – so we’re the ones severing the link between The [trans] Children and their daemons.
Oh! Well now I feel stupid for not seeing it. Although the two main characters in the original novels make a decision that results in them being separated from their daemons. I’m trying to avoid spoilers here. It’s not a “there’s no other choice” situation, but the only other option is to abandon the quest. The more recent prequel and sequels feature people who are able to be apart from their daemons. One character does this by choice, as the only way to protect two people at the same time. The others undergo some kind of spiritual rite of passage. I guess the key thing is that it’s a choice (of sorts). I guess I will have to think of the witches of Lyra’s world as non-binary now. How tedious.