What's stopping you from moving on and not talk about it yourself if it bothers you that much? You have over 30 messages in this thread alone and thus you're contributing to the discussion quite a lot. You simply can't tell others to stop discussing this, they are not going to.
Transgender rights discussion
- Thread starter crappycraperson
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I'm not telling anybody what they can and can't do but I can express my opinion on anything I like thanks very much. If you want to talk endlessly about a children's book be my guest even if it does make you very odd in my eyes. I think people maybe need a bit of perspective here.
There's some wumming going on in this thread.
Your opinion is that others should stop giving their opinions about this though. And no, unlike you I don't want to talk endlessly about a children's book, as proven by the fact that I have less than ten times fewer messages in the thread than you.
Righto, I'll bugger off then I've said my piece. This thread is a minefield anyway I'd rather not get involved with.
Imagine being so utterly oblivious to the idea that an author may express their personal views through their fiction. Imagine if you didn't understand what an allegory was and fables were just about the lives of cute fluffies.
the thread is about trans discussion to be fair
That's an interesting example because chrichton overtly does insert his views into the novel with all the footnotes, so they are there to be critiqued.
Looks like you have moved on, which is cool. Dahl was a great author, and the books are interesting, so people with other interests than you will probably carry on as they like. Incidentally he was also very antisemitic, which is unfortunate.
We're on Redcafe. People talk endlessly about crypto, prince Harry, dating, video games, bald people, bees, attacking the space, false nines, body language and Twitter. Being above someone talking about some of the most influential books ever written strikes me as a bit strange.
Alright. Wonder what Heinlein thought about fascism, unless he told us directly only mugs would dare to speculate. Dickens? Who knows, they're just stories.
You see that's silly because again, Heinlein often world builds all sorts of political systems to suit the theme of his novel and explore what arises. Starship Troopers is a military fantasy with fascist elements. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is a Randian libertarian fantasy, the opposite end of the pole. Is Heinlein therefore a fascist or a libertarian? There is plenty you can critique with how he draws his characters and how they react sometimes (see Friday or god forbid, The Number of the Beast), but you can't determine he was a fascist from Starship Troopers.
Starship Troopers is a satirical work, it's criticism of fascism!
The film is, the book isnt (satirical). Have you read it?
You know what, you're right, of course. I don't know why I mixed up the book and the film, pretty silly.
The militarism in the book is pretty compatible with e.g. Hoppean libertarianism, as is restricting voting rights to certain groups.
Imagine being oblivious to the difference between novels that authors write as a vehicle for their opinions, and novels that aren't. Imagine judging all authors against the moral standards of their characters rather than on their own merits as storytellers or the intent of the novel itself.
You make it sound like Rowling was just walking in the park, minding her own business, and was mindlessly attacked. She chose to enter the political arena when she shared her awful views on trans people.
And yet you brought up fecking American Psycho as an example of a book that should not be used to infer the author's personal views. Talk about really not getting it. The views expressed in that book are as obvious as it gets, and you obviously didn't get it.
The Harry Potter books aren't like ASOIAF(for instance), but they're not exactly children's books either. You got torture, abuse, trauma, fascism, politics and plenty of murders. There's even a chapter where we follow the English prime minister's point of view as he's frustrated by the voters turning on him.
At the same time, the books are not as morally ambiguous as you'd expect from more adult fantasy books. Rowling has a very black and white approach and it is very clear who the good guys are. And the villains, bar a few rare exceptions, are almost always portrayed as ugly or fat. And if the villains are women then Rowling will often give them masculine features(large "man-like" hands, square jaw, moustache etc). Rowling's biases and real life opinions shine through the pages.
The universe she has created is in many ways much worse than modern Europe in terms of discrimination(there's even slavery!) and she will gladly acknowledge this in her books. But in her idea of a happy ending(her words) nothing has actually changed or been addressed. They manage to defeat fascism, but fascism had largely been dead for 10 years prior to the main story. It's just a return to status quo. In her idea of a perfect world you don't do anything to upset the system. You just make sure that competent people are in charge to maintain it and keep fascism in check.
If you re-read the HP books while knowing about Rowling's love for New Labour and her TERF stance then a lot of the frustrating parts suddenly make a whole lot of sense.
There's a lot of that about.
I get that. She made the mistake of sharing an unpopular opinion about sex vs gender on Twitter. And instead of backing off when she realised she’d poked a hornet’s nest, she doubled down, dug her heels in and went full tilt into the culture war. Hence we are where we are. With floor tiles in scenes in movies of her books being used as evidence that she’s antisemitic and 90 minute podcasts on her problematic political views in a children’s novel about wizards and goblins.
I had the pop-up version. Preferred Goodnight Moon though.
From the very periphery of opinion on her, one of my defining memories is her refusal to boycott Israel. Obviously I don't hold her in high regard for that, combined with the comments on the trans issues (mainly the point about the historic suffering of women - it's vague now what exactly annoyed me, I've not kept up).
The opinionated among us have all said things to disrupt hornets and dug in, but this is a long time to say she's just being stubborn?
And I’m not even sure Pogue really is a terrible person. Just insanely stubborn and argumentative. To the point of self harm. Which raises the possibility that he will be denying the holocaust by the time this thread reaches 100 pages.
Do people actually think that Rowling is clever enough to instill clandestine messages of transphobia or anti Semitic notions in HO books?
Has anyone read them? There's plot holes galore, poorly explained and poorly worded subplots, there's artifacts she made up on the spot to fit the story she tried to create.
There's no cohesion throughout any of the series, it's a shockingly poor series of books written by someone who really is an average writer at best.
Yet she's clever enough to hide her evil thoughts in this prose?
Has anyone read them? There's plot holes galore, poorly explained and poorly worded subplots, there's artifacts she made up on the spot to fit the story she tried to create.
There's no cohesion throughout any of the series, it's a shockingly poor series of books written by someone who really is an average writer at best.
Yet she's clever enough to hide her evil thoughts in this prose?
Yeah, there’s obviously some tipping point where a very stubborn person defending an unpopular (or misguided? misinformed?) opinion online ends up fairly removed from reality. And that’s going to be influenced not only by how stubborn they are but also how sustained and malicious is the flack they get for that opinion and also, undeniably, their underlying character. It’s a mixed bag.
I sometimes think I’m on my own path down that slippery slope when I try to defend Fred’s latest haphazard midfield performance.
An now, while you are undoubtedly awful, you do hold your hands up occasionally.
It's wild how you're still peddling this claim whilst ignoring every post that's asked you who in this thread actually accused her of being a raging antisemite.
You can absolutely take conclusions about his politics from his work, it’s not something that can be debated, he’s on the record talking length about what inspired the work and the real world allegories that’s inspired it.
Sure you can’t do this for every writer and every work, but you honestly could not have picked a worst example for your point. It’s akin to reading Animal Farm and saying there’s no way of knowing the author’s thoughts on Stalin
But people have had 90 minute podcasts about it!! This is completely unprecedented. Usually people only spend a lot of time and effort on things I think are worth spending a lot of time and effort on.
a) You’ve a strange definition of “wild”
b) I haven’t ignored any post asking me that question (that I know of) never mind every post
c) Post #1608
I don't think that any of this was intentional. I think that she is mostly unaware of her own biases to the point that it affects her writing. Adult readers don't even have to read between the lines. She probably didn't even notice how a character being fat or ugly practically always is shorthand for them being morally corrupt or downright evil or how most of her evil female characters have masculine features. I don't know much about the anti-semitic stuff, but my guess is that this was unintentional too.
Which views in particular? You can read the book in any number of ways and any number of people have. I'm still not sure what conclusions I'm supposed to draw about Brett Easton Ellis politics. He did have a thematic point I think he was trying to get across, but I don't necessarily draw any conclusions about Brett Easton Ellis's own beliefs from it.
You say that, but a lot of people who have read Animal Farm think it's anti-socialist, instead of anti-Stalin, anti-Soviet, anti-authoritarian. Same with 1984, incredibly.
I'd like to see them try that with Road to Wigan Pier or Homage to Catalonia, but I'm sure they'd manage.
All art reflect its times and the zeitgeist. We can only be sure what Lucas's Vietnam era politics are because he told us, in innumerable interviews and bios. Otherwise you could just as easily infer from Star Wars that it's about squabbling over which branch of the Skywalker family gets to hold office, ie George Lucas is in favour of inherited aristocratic power. I mean, do the slaves we see in Episode 1 get liberated at the end of Return of the Jedi or not?
Animal Farm was written specifically to deliver a warning about Stalinism.
I dunno, the fact you're still banging on about this despite it being immediately obvious she wasn't being accused of being antisemitic, is pretty wild.
J.K. Rowling is anti-semitic? That’s a new one to me. I thought her only problematic views were around trans rights?
EDIT: She’s being called anti-semitic because of the decor on the floor of a bank in one of the movies?!
That's it. That's where your claim she was accused of being antisemitic should have stopped.
PC gone mad innit..
To be fair, and contradicting myself somewhat, I wouldn't have felt comfortable with Heinlein being around my 12 year daughter, after reading the Door into Summer.
So at worst she uses cliches and kids novel stereotypes. Show me a major kids' author who hasn't used the same shorthand.
No, but it has apparently become a staple of this thread to grossly exaggerate the claims made against J.K. Rowling as it relates to the Harry Potter books. Literally no-one has claimed that she deliberately has put any transphobic or antisemitic messages into the Harry Potter books.Do people actually think that Rowling is clever enough to instill clandestine messages of transphobia or anti Semitic notions in HO books?
Has anyone read them? There's plot holes galore, poorly explained and poorly worded subplots, there's artifacts she made up on the spot to fit the story she tried to create.
There's no cohesion throughout any of the series, it's a shockingly poor series of books written by someone who really is an average writer at best.
Yet she's clever enough to hide her evil thoughts in this prose?
The books go beyond the children's book label around book 3 or 4. I'd say her books are somewhere between Narnia and ASOIAF in terms of maturity. They're books for teenagers.
Why even bring up racism, discrimination, slavery and a whole laundry list of systemic issues, address them, and then do absolutely nothing about them in a story that is literally about good vs evil? Why spend a considerable amount of pages making fun of the only character trying to make positive change as if she's in the wrong? It all seems really odd. Either she didn't see these things as issues or she completely forgot about them. Hilariously enough it could actually be the latter.
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I read Starship Troopers recently. I really enjoyed it. I didn't read it as an endorsement of fascism, rather an "endorsement" of a strong industrial military complex, or at the very least a fictionalized perspective on a society with one.
Upon further reading, at the very least, it seemed quite relevant to what was going on in the US at the time and there was debate about to what extent Starship Troopers reflected Heinlein's own views.