Back in November “Grace” Lavery was pining for a debate.

Helen Joyce took him up on it.

Let’s do this thing!

Or…

Everybody is laughing at him.

Another thing about this – or maybe it’s the same thing but just louder –

The other thing. There is no Harry Potter without its creator. Why? Because she’s the one who created it. That thing they love so much? (I don’t love it, myself, so I can take a detached view of the fandom and the ardor.) That thing they love so much is the work of the woman they think they hate so much. You can’t have a Harry Potter without its creator, because that would be something completely different. The creator isn’t incidental to the creation; she’s prior and essential.

Their adoration of Harry Potter means they adore her, whether they know it or not. This isn’t her fingernails we’re talking about here, it’s the product of her mind. In their passion for Harry they have a passion for Jo. It’s idiotic that they think they can split the two.

But then they think they can split people from their sex, so there you go.

Check out this thread if you want a furious denunciation of the Times for publicly trashing JKR.

Shahrar Ali is suing the Green Party.

A Green Party spokesman is bringing legal action against his former colleagues after he was sacked because of his views on the transgender debate.

Shahrar Ali, 53, was removed as the spokesman for policing and domestic safety on February 5 after activists complained that his tweets about women’s sex-based rights were transphobic.

It’s a neat trick to label non-belief in your magical mystery woo “phobic.” I don’t believe extraterrestrials drop in on us now and then for a chat; that’s not “phobic.” I just don’t believe it.

Party officials ruled that “his decision to champion a highly controversial position in the trans rights debate is not compatible” with his role.

But it’s fine to champion the other highly controversial position, in fact judging by this it’s mandatory.

And what are trans rights? For the billionth time, no one wants to take away their rights. There is no “right” to identify as other people and seize their rights.

Dr Ali, a former deputy leader who was a spokesman for nine years, has publicly backed the rights of women to defend single-sex spaces such as prisons, refuges and sports categories, rather than for them to be opened without limits to males who identify as women.

In other words he’s doing the right thing, and the demands are an encroachment on women’s rights.

No, really????

Trans inmates revert to males when they leave Scottish prisons

I’m stunned. It never ever occurred to me for a second that they would do that. I thought they were totally sincere.

A study, published in the British Journal of Criminology, also revealed that some of these prisoners may only have identified as women in order to have sex with female inmates.

Staggered again!

No I’m not. This is what women have been saying all along.

The SPS said it has no plans to make use of the new research.

Sure. It’s only women who are affected, so who cares.

This dreck is so maddening and frustrating. “We enlightened ones know how much better it is to just identify out of being women than to insist that women are not inferior.”

Oh yes, if she were alive today – if only she’d had the good sense to do her living while we brilliant all-seeing perfected humans are making everything glorious, instead of that stupid boring wrong clueless thing known as “the past.” How pathetic of her them to be a she when she they could have been a xir.

She didn’t “describe herself as a woman,” she was a woman.

Originally a comment by Der Durchwanderer on To scour the text.

And, of course, it often doesn’t even work. Sensitivity readers are self-selected (if not to say self-identified), claiming to speak for a particular group or so-called lived experience. Yet nobody (but nobody!) can realistically claim to account for every perspective within a group or class of people who share similar life experiences, and so anyone claiming to offer this is selling a bill of goods.

All too often, despite having engaged one or more of these charlatans, a work is still held up for a roasting by professional rivals or overenthusiastic “fans” who’ve attempted to fill the void of meaning in their lives with obsessive policing of other people’s creative output. Such heresy hunts are especially common in YA Twitter (which is to say among any author who wants to publish in YA at all). Occasionally a foment will rise so high that an agent will throw an author under the bus, as I believe B&W has already covered.

This is wokeness moral panic in a nutshell; insisting that everyone engage in a certain action and, at the same time, insisting that this action has no actual power, either in intent or in effect. It is in the same epiphenomenon class as a religion insisting that God made each individual human special, and that every human is a wretched sinner. The carrot and the stick, wrapped in one, with the only true answer being to give ever more power to the priests and priest-aspirants.

You don’t have to like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or even be to the left of Lindsey Graham to find it disturbing that Fox personalities single her out for sustained personalized bullying.

The Fox News host Tucker Carlson attacked Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Friday night, claiming the US congresswoman was not a woman of colour.

“She’s a rich entitled white lady,” he said.

A “Karen.” It’s interesting how right-wing men and left-wing men join hands to abuse women.

Ocasio-Cortez’s mother is from Puerto Rico, her father from the Bronx. She has described herself as a woman of colour.

From the Bronx? That doesn’t tell us much. Puerto Rico at least hints at Hispanic, though of course it’s possible to be from there without being Hispanic, but the Bronx hints at…what? Could be anything.

Carlson said: “No one ever dares to challenge that description, but every honest person knows it is hilariously absurd.

“There is no place on Earth outside of American colleges and newsrooms where Sandy Cortez” – Carlson’s derisory nickname for the New York congresswoman – “would be recognized as a quote, woman of color, because she’s not!

“She’s a rich entitled white lady. She’s the pampered obnoxious ski bunny in the matching snowsuit who tells you to pull up your mask while you’re standing in the lift line at Jackson Hole. They’re all the same. It doesn’t matter what shade they are.”

As I say – disturbing. It’s not commentary, it’s not politics, it’s certainly not news – it’s just abuse. What’s the point of it other than to gin up hatred?

Maybe it’s the permafrost that’s doing it. Anything to distract us from the realization that the pot is heating up.

News from Ottawa:

Canadian police on Saturday deployed pepper spray and stun grenades in a continuing effort to break up the blockade of trucks and demonstrators that has occupied downtown Ottawa for more than three weeks in a protest against pandemic protocols.

More than three weeks seems like ample time to get a point across. It seems like way too much time when the point in question is such a selfish and dimwitted point as refusing to get vaccinated during a pandemic.

In a tweet addressed to the truckers, police said: “We told you to leave. We gave you time to leave. We were slow and methodical, yet you were assaultive and aggressive with officers and the horses.”

The horses ffs. As if it’s their fault.

Peter Tatchell should look in the damn mirror before he yells “SHAME!” at women.

So tell us more about sensitivity readers.

The Times explores the question:

Joanne Harris*, the author of Chocolat, took umbrage: “I think you’re confusing sensitivity with weakness . . . It takes courage for an author to admit they may not have all the answers.” Dickens had revised his depiction of the Jewish character Fagin in Oliver Twist, she argued, removing many references to the character’s religion after corresponding with a Jewish critic, Eliza Davis. “He showed the capacity to grow. Perhaps that’s what makes a great writer.”

*The Joanne Harris who declined to remove a “fuck” from her latest novel for a US publisher.

But a Jewish critic who enlightened Dickens isn’t a “sensitivity reader,” she’s a reader with knowledge of a particular subject – a particular set of people – that Dickens didn’t have.

Other writers are incensed by sensitivity readers. None more so than Kate Clanchy, the author who was accused of using racial tropes in her 2019 memoir Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me. After the furore, her former publishers, Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, sent the book to a number of sensitivity readers to scour the text for problematic content before it was reprinted.

But hang on. Who are these sensitivity readers, and what is their training? What do they know and how do they know it? How do publishers know what they know and how they know it? How does any of this work?

Clanchy also claims that a sensitivity reader flagged her use of “gay”, saying that she should have used “LGBTQ”…

Like hell! The meanings are sharply different, and it’s not more “sensitive” to use the ever more useless catchall LGBTQ+#%&&%@. T is not at all the same as L and G, so no, that is bad wrong illiterate flagging.

Sensitivity readers are hired by editors and authors to review manuscripts before publication. They check for stereotypes, dialogue that doesn’t ring true or language that may cause offence. Although much of their work focuses on race, advice is offered in subjects ranging from “dating while fat” to “tiger parents” and age-gap relationships.

That’s all interesting but again I ask: how do they know any of this? Where do they get their expertise? How does anyone know they know more about it than we do? Where are the Sensitivity training colleges or academies or institutes? Who are these people?

Those who welcome sensitivity readers see them as a way to ensure authenticity when writing about communities a writer does not belong to, in the same way a sci-fi writer would consult a scientist. “I don’t see them as being antagonistic to free speech; it’s more a different layer of research,” Harris says.

Ah but it’s not “in the same way” at all. Presumably a sci-fi writer wouldn’t just consult a random scientist, but someone with specific knowledge of a specific subject. “Sensitivity” isn’t specific. What is it about sensitivity readers that makes them informed about all “communities”? Please do explain, I’m fascinated.

Maybe the brief isn’t “inform the author about this particular community or issue” at all but rather “search for everything anyone could possibly fly into a rage about.” If you hire “sensitivity” people to search for “sensitive” writings, they’re going to find them, so that you’ll hire them again. Baby needs new shoes.

A cancel-cancel:

The bestselling author Joanne Harris has turned down a US book deal after the publishers demanded she take out an “f-bomb” from the novel.

Well done that woman.

The Chocolat author, who lives near Huddersfield in West Yorkshire, tweeted on Saturday: “Today I turned down a book deal in the US because they wanted to edit out my use of ‘the f-bomb’. I refused for two reasons: one, because I don’t use words accidentally. They matter. And second, because I don’t believe my use of the word ‘fuck’ harms anyone.”

Exactly so. I do a bit of writing myself and I don’t use words accidentally. I thought we’d agreed as a society or a grown-up reading public that the word “fuck” doesn’t harm anyone several decades ago.

Which reminds me of a thing. My first ever bad edit, and in this case I was not given the option of rejecting it. My senior year at the tiny girls’ school I’d attended since kindergarten I won the story contest so my story was published in the yearbook – and when the yearbooks arrived shortly before graduation I found that a word had been changed. I was enraged, and my English teacher who was also the yearbook supervisor was annoyed too if I remember correctly. It’s hard to figure out what gave a company whose job it was to put a book between hard covers the right to change the content without asking. We were the editors, not the company. Anyway, the word – I’d had a character exclaim “Shit!” in anger or shock, and they changed it to “Shoot!” It’s not just that it’s ooh no swearing, it’s that the substitution is terrible. A character exclaiming “Shoot!” is just stupid. So, yeah, rock on Jane Harris.

Harris added: “I gave it some thought, and the decision was mine to take. That’s how publishing works, and I’m happy with my choice.

“In context it was a characterisation device, and would have sounded weak if I’d taken it out.”

Exactly.

She’s not annoyed at the publisher though.

Harris said that she did not feel offended by the request from the publisher, which she described as a house with a strong “cosy” branding, adding, “I understand, but that’s not me”.

“I made my choice and so did they,” she said. “I don’t remotely feel as if I’ve been ‘cancelled’.”

Fair enough.

Harris said she chose to make the decision public on the back of a discussion on social media prompted by John Boyne, the author of The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas, criticising the increasing use by authors and publishers of “sensitivity readers” to ensure that they are representing certain groups correctly or to avoid causing offence.

Harris was quoted in the media on her thoughts, and expanded on them on her blog, where she wrote: “I think a lot of people (some of them authors, most of them not) misunderstand the role of a sensitivity reader. That’s probably mostly because they’ve never used one, and are misled by the word ‘sensitivity’, which, in a world of toxic masculinity, is often mistaken for weakness. To these people, hiring someone to check one’s work for sensitivity purposes implies a surrendering of control, a shift in the balance of power.”

I think it’s a little more complicated than that…

Indiana ACLU turning its back on girls and their civil liberties.

Transgender girls aren’t girls.

THE ISSUE ISN’T TRANS KIDS.

The issue is boys destroying girls’ sports.

Nobody is saying trans students don’t belong in sports. The issue is trans students who are male intruding on students who are female.

There’s nothing to “protect” them from; they’re not in danger. It’s girls who are in danger of losing their sports and their privacy.

Talk. Like. Grownups.

If only this discussion could get out of the baby talk stage. Let trans girls play sports!! Yes thank you nobody is trying to stop them.

A controversial bill to ban transgender girls from playing girls sports in school has passed a key committee, signaling it’s on its way to becoming law.

…

Last week, lawmakers heard hours of testimony from individuals on both sides of the bill. There are supporters of the bill, who are concerned what impact the participation of transgender girls may have on girls’ sports. They say transgender girls may have unfair physical advantages that would make it harder to cisgender girls to secure a spot or compete on an even playing field.

Of course they do, at least if we’re talking about post-puberty boys. This is part of the baby talk: pretending we all have no clue that males have physical advantages over females.

Those opposing the bill, though, say transgender kids should have the same opportunities to compete and play that their cisgender peers enjoy. And, they say, there are already transgender kids playing school sports.

They would still have those same opportunities. Stop with the baby talk. And the issue isn’t “transgender kids” it’s boys. And if boys are already cheating by competing against girls then that’s a bad thing and unfair to the girls.

Transgender kids don’t pose a threat to girls’ sports, say advocates for the LGBTQ community.

Then they’re lying. Boys do pose a threat to girls’ sports once they’re past puberty. Everybody knows this. Journalists keep hiding it with this baby talk about “kids” instead of “boys.”

The ACLU of Indiana has said it will oppose the bill in the courts, should it be signed into law.

The ACLU of Indiana is all over it. It’s not a civil liberty for boys to play on girls’ teams.

Originally a comment by Freemage on Imagine.

Okay, I’m gonna leap down this rabbit-hole for a moment, because I think it really gets at the critiques of Rowling and Harry Potter from the TRAs:

H. P. Lovecraft was the creator of the Cthulu “mythos”. He pretty much invented, whole-cloth, the idea of ancient gods who are so far beyond human experience that to apply mortal morals to them is absurd, and to contemplate them directly is to invite insanity. Just as Mary Shelly created the first real Sci-Fi Horror story, Lovecraft pretty much invented the whole genre of Existential Horror. His writings have inspired scores of other writers to produce work in the same genre, as well as art, music and parodies. (I’m fond of the HP Lovecraft Christmas Carol book, personally.)

He was also a flaming racist. And not just by modern standards; even by the standards of a white man in the early 1900s, he was an extremist. (He also was terrified by science and technology, including the notion of air-conditioning.)

And these views are rife throughout his writings. The view that anyone who isn’t a high-born WASP is in some way not merely inferior, but actually dangerous, is [integral] to his stories.

Naturally, this has created some difficulties in the modern era. When retelling his stories in new adaptations, or in new works based on his mythos, writers, filmmakers and others generally take considerable effort to excise the elements that are so offensive. One of the biggest triumphs in the remake category comes from Jordan Peele, whose Lovecraft County takes pretty much everything that’s fun and enjoyable about HP’s writings, and then infuses it with a strong anti-racist vibe. Perfect subversion.

I went on this tangent to show that it’s possible to ‘imagine the art without the artist’. But now, let’s look at the billboard slogan again.

What, exactly, would be changed in a Harry Potter-verse that was written by someone who wasn’t J.K. Rowling? Well… pretty much absolutely nothing. At most, there might’ve been a greater diversity of skin-tones among the characters. But there’s no intrinsic social or political views that are driving her world-building the way there is with H.P.’s. You can’t eliminate her ‘transphobia’ because there’s nothing in the work that contains her views on sex-based differences in the first place, other than the existence of boy’s and girl’s bathrooms.

Another tantrum.

“transphobic scholarship” “pain and suffering” “the damage caused” “injurious scholarship” “directly and indirectly harmed” – it sounds like something really terrible, doesn’t it.

“harmful scholarship”

How dare those traitors be unoffended by the content? How dare they not do everything they can to get it removed and rejected and forever silenced?

“personal safety” “harmful scholarship”

“unwaveringly correct decision” “harmful and problematic”

Melodrama is a powerful drug.

Useful summary of state of play.

Harriet Hall on Charles Windsor as self-proclaimed Enemy of the Enlightenment:

Edzard Ernst has a new book out: Charles, The Alternative Prince: An Unauthorized Biography. I wrote a full book review that will appear in the next issue of Skeptical Inquirer magazine, but I wanted to give my readers on Science-Based Medicine a heads-up.  Charles’ efforts to promote alternative medicine have been mentioned many times on SBM, but readers may not appreciate the depth of his folly. I know I didn’t, until I read this book. The full story has never been told until now.

Ernst uses Prince Charles’ own words to demonstrate his ignorance of science and medicine. He thinks conventional medicine is nothing but “pills and procedures”. At the age of 34, he had the chutzpah to lecture to the members of the British Medical Association on the power of spiritualism, urging them to follow their intuition rather than look for scientific evidence. He has always been intuitively averse to scientific materialism and was drawn to mysticism.

He has the chutzpah to lecture everybody on everything. He lectures architects on architecture, scientists on science, city planners on city planning. He thinks he’s much much much cleverer than he is. Dunning-Kruger to the max.

Perhaps the worst thing is that he is proud of being called “the enemy of the Enlightenment”. He is clearly anti-science. He calls for more research into alternative medicine, but he doesn’t mean what we mean by research. He doesn’t want research to ask “if” a treatment is effective, he wants it to demonstrate that it is effective, and that it would save money (which it would not).

He identifies as right about everything.

CNN “reports”:

Lia Thomas, a transgender woman swimmer for the University of Pennsylvania, won the 500-yard freestyle race at the Ivy League women’s swimming and diving championships on Thursday night in 4 minutes and 37.32 seconds, beating her next closest competitor by 7.5 seconds.

In other words William Thomas, a man, won the 500-yard freestyle race at the Ivy League women’s swimming and diving championships on Thursday night in 4 minutes and 37.32 seconds, beating his next closest competitor, a woman, by 7.5 seconds. Which is to say, a man won a women’s race by blatantly gaming the system. This should not be allowed to happen, end of story.

Her dominance in the pool has raised questions about the NCAA’s policies toward transgender women athletes and the proper balance between inclusion and fairness.

Fuck “balance.” Women’s sports should be for women. “Inclusion” in that context should mean all women, all kinds of women, women of all classes and races and ethnicities. It should not mean men.

Huh. Subway ads for the New York Times attacking JK Rowling. That’s a new level.

The New York Times has come under fire for an ad that describes a woman imagining what Harry Potter would be like without its author JK Rowling.

Setting aside the morality of a major newspaper singling out a woman for hatred in its advertising, that’s just plain a stupid thing to say. Let’s imagine what The Trout Quintet would be like without Schubert. What would King Lear be like without Shakespeare? Wuthering Heights without Emily Bronte? Fallingwater without Frank Lloyd Wright?

At least it’s an easy exercise. The answer is nothing. Zero. An empty space.

And as for the morality…well. It’s beneath contempt.

The advertisement is part of the paper’s new brand marketing campaign, ‘Independent Journalism for an Independent Life’, which according to a press release aims to give an insight into the lives of several New York Times subscribers.

By singling out a woman for abuse because she has an independent mental life.

Why isn’t everyone there booing?