Very even-tempered.
The small-minded bigoted fuckwittery of course is skepticism about a magical ability to change sex.
There are a lot of things I don’t care for, but I don’t threaten to push people down a set of stairs and laugh at the bounce because of them.
It’s all in the bounce.
Comments
17 responses to “Even-tempered”
Violence is not a problem for those who are defending the poor defenseless oppressed transwomen. It’s justified as much as punching Nazis and Proud Boys and Trump voters and anyone who you find reprehensible for whatever reason. It’s okay, noble, in fact, to hate haters.
How can one be infamous for a good thing??
The disconnect in the language is…striking…
“… infamously even-tempered…” reminds me of the Neutrals on Futurama.
Zap Branigan: “I hate these filthy Neutrals, Kif. With enemies, you know where they stand, but with Neutrals? Who knows! It sickens me.”
What is the Terry Pratchett connection?
By not knowing what the word means?
But really, I suppose, just via a kind of lazy smug self-admiring “irony.” Like, “I’m so non-violent it’s practically criminal.”
Someone on Twitter quoted Pratchett
Apparently, that upset Rogers.
(Perhaps he saw himself in the mirror?)
I have to confess I have no problem with hating people. Such as smug fundie ministers who catch Covid while opining that infection is a sign from Gawd.
But violence? Nah. Beyond the pale.
While I’m not entirely sure, given Pratchett’s writing in Monstrous Regiment, his absolute ridicule of the Campaign for Equal Heights, his love of Dawkins, and his dealing with the Dwarf sex problem (which could be seen as a trans thing but pretty clearly is more about y’know, a weird sort of feminism) I’m pretty sure he’d be on the side of Reality.
“For the enemy is not Troll, nor is it Dwarf, but it is the baleful, the malign, the cowardly, the vessels of hatred, those who do a bad thing and call it good…”
― Terry Pratchett, Thud!
It’s treacherous business to claim a deceased person as an adherent (or opponent) of some current-day political or culture-war position, in the absence of an unambiguous statement during their lifetime on the particular issue (often impossible to find if the particular fight didn’t flare up until they were dead). This caution goes for both gender-critical and trans-activist types.
It’s also probably unwarranted to claim a culture-war position for an author (living or dead) based on what fictional characters say or do, since they don’t necessarily reflect the views of the author. (Shakespeare didn’t say to kill all lawyers; one of his characters, not such a good guy, did.)
If JK Rowling had died before getting embroiled in the gender flap, what positions on the gender wars would have been attributed to her (by supporters or opponents)?
I don’t pretend to know Pratchett’s mind exactly, but I’ve re-read almost every book he’s written dozens of times. Now for sure he could have entirely different views than many of his characters, even the ones that seem to be author avatars (it *is* fiction after all) but there are many recurring themes that show up in nearly every book and what appear to be political points he want to make. But then again, I don’t buy Death of the Author as a valid literary critique.
Re #5, “What is the Terry Pratchett connection?”
I’m assuming you are among the many who haven’t been following this mess, and I was unclear about the beginnings, so I looked up some information. The quick summary is that, for some reason, the question arose about what the late Terry Pratchett’s views on transgender ideology might have been. It was suggested (by whom I’m not clear, but some people who are not trans ideologues) that he might have sided with reality. Trans ideologues, among them Pratchett’s daughter and Neil Gaiman, were “horrified” that Pratchett was being deemed “transphobic”. Counter-claims were made that Pratchett clearly was a science-denier and ideologue like them and would never deign to listen to reason on this topic. (I’m editorializing a little. :-) ) Much argument and “evidence presentation” ensued.
I tend to agree that we shouldn’t try to ascribe opinions to dead people. I also tend to think we should be charitable toward dead people if we have no reason to think badly of them. That last point seems to have two diametrically opposed interpretations in this argument.
It’s also really hard to tell the opinion of someone suffering from Alzheimer’s as well… kinda surprised his kid is defending transgenderism considering how much she dunked on The Watch (may it never get another season).
In any case I’m pretty sure pre-death Pratchett wouldn’t be gender critical (he’d be lampooning them for sure) but the man who wrote Monstrous Regiment, I Shall Wear Midnight, Science of Discworld, and Raising Steam wasn’t confused about what sex is, not one bit.
Brian M #8
Same here. As somebody once said (from memory), “I could never kill someone*, but I have read many obituaries with great delight”
*There are people I would never lift a finger to save.
Some fights energise me. Some leach away my energy in thick, black rivulets because they are so stupid.
Guess which type this is?
Let’s see. The question is whether an author, who died before gender ideology extremism became a thing, would have sided with the GIEs or the GCs. This entirely hypothetical opinion on a complex social phenomenon is to spring fully-formed from the author’s works on entirely different (if superficially related) subjects. It must include an assessment of the author’s ontological and epistemological understanding of sex and gender and gender identity, based on some books he wrote about dwarfs and shit. All of this, of course, assumes the intrusion into ours of an entirely counter-factual universe in which either Pratchett didn’t die or was somehow able to communicate his paranormal visions of the future in his past writings, so obscurely that nobody could spot them at the time, yet at the same time so clearly that they are unambiguously obvious after the fact, immune to bias.
I mean, that’s the question we’re being asked, right? It’s so many levels removed from reality that we practically need to invent a new grammar to discuss it properly.
It need not be said that Pratchett was thoughtful, compassionate and insightful. My impression is that his insight came largely from and was driven by his compassion. This is an admirable trait and one I aspire to. It would be disappointing, then, if Pratchett’s ideological beliefs differed greatly from my own.
It might mean that I’m not a thoughtful, compassionate, insightful, admirable person!
Or – even worse – that I was wrong about Pratchett! Yes, that must be it, burn his books!
But the point remains that Pratchett’s views, in this insane counter-factual universe we’ve had to invent for the purposes of discussing them, would not affect observable reality in the slightest. Men still wouldn’t be women and women still wouldn’t be safe around men, so the only thing we’d gain from knowing those views would be fleeting sense of pleasure or disappointment.
What a fucking waste of everyone’s time.
For what it’s worth – and I’ve now disqualified myself from speculating on what Pratchett’s views might have been, much to my annoyance – I think Pratchett was right when he said that his later books, the Tiffany Aching ones, were his finest work. They are children’s books but the themes are most definitely adult. They show that he very much knew about sex and about power and about women standing up for themselves. And that is as far as I’ll go.
Pratchett being on “my side” or not wouldn’t really be a factor in me enjoying his books because I am not a stupid ideologue (and burning books is wrong regardless of their content). But I too am guilty of the trap: those books very much inform my current political world view (though now it’s being tempered by Thomas Paine, John Stuart Mills, MLK, and others because world views evolve with each new source of information).