Underlined
Owen Jones gets a little ahead of himself.
It’s not a fact that X people will read this and not care about that. You can’t call a prediction a fact. You especially can’t call a prediction a fact when it’s as tendentious as OJ’s. He doesn’t know what gender critical people will or won’t read, and he doesn’t know how we will or won’t react to what we read. In short it’s a really stupid argument to claim that This Evil is underlined by my prediction that X people will do Y and react Zly. You can’t underline current evils with your claims about what will happen tomorrow.
Owen got put in the naughty corner for suggesting that use of the word “genocide” by some trans activists in some contexts might be seen as hyperbolic, so he has to do penance and prove himself worthy, all over again. But we all know it will never be enough. From now on, Owen will be suspect.
I would engage in a shitload of victim blaming if I thought Bridges was actually the victim in this situation.
And exactly how much does Owen Jones care about the physical threats against oh, I don’t know, JK Rowling for example? Not the slightest, I wager.
@3 Good point. He does say Bridges is 21 as if it’s relevant. Maybe JKR is too much of an old “cis” hag for his consideration.
Which is true, if by “will care about in the slightest” you mean “will retract the complaint.” It’s all or nothing, all the time.
I thought the whole “name -> age” thing was just a British newsie quirk
He’s right though, even if Bridges was actually subjected to polonium poisoning I wouldn’t care.
OK, I am going to be THAT person and ask
Has anybody SEEN any of those claimed threats towards Mister Bridges?
I would like to SEE the proof because if I recognize an account that belongs to a real person on the gender critical side, I would like to call them out for their behavior.
@Southwest88 #7
I thought the same thing myself. What physical threats? From whom? I don’t believe him just because he says so. Especially if calling him “him” is “literal violence.” Ts have cried wolf far too many times. Besides, he’s a proven cheater and a liar, so why should anyone believe anything he says?
Southwest88, maddog1129, add me to the list of skeptics.
I hear this from gender identity activists, but I’ve never seen a single screenshot.
Gender critics get threats all the time. I’ve gotten one myself, and I’m an unknown. We have plenty of documentation.
It’s really not hard to believe that he’s gotten some threats, but on the other hand we’ve all been told so many times that questioning (or, heaven forfend, mocking) trans dogma is “violence,” skepticism is reasonable.
Say the empress is naked and her penis is showing, and her defenders will cry wolf.
Lady Mondegreen #9
Sorry for sounding like a broken record, but to me this was one of the earlies warning signs that the trans agenda was of a very different nature than the feminist or anti-racist or LGB ones. When I started paying attention to social justice issues (with a special emphasis on feminism) in the aftermath of “Elevatorgate” and the ensuing Anti-Harassment Policy Wars, the women being targeted by MRAs never had any problem providing endless specific examples (in the form of direct quotes, screenshots etc.) of obvious, unambiguous cyberbullying, harassment, hatespeech, and threats. My most vivid memory from that time is watching Caroline Criado-Perez’s mentionings on Twitter fill up with the ugliest cyber-bullying I had ever seen quicker than the Twitter feed could load them. I would click “refresh”, and by the time my browser (not a particularly slow one!) was finished loading the tweets, there were already 15 new ones waiting in line. These attacks could go on for hours at the time, every day for months or even years*.
When I started hearing about the diabolical “TERFs” (supposedly at least as bad as the MRAs sending rape and death threats to CCP) it was a very different story indeed. No screenshots, no direct quotes, nothing but the TRA’s own words. One of the most bizarre conversations I’ve had in my life was when a TRA PM’ed me on twitter to interrogate me about why I was following a certain feminist blogger who, by his own admission, had never said anything explicitly transphobic. Apparently it was “implied in very subtle ways” that only trans people could detect, and I was not qualified to question their judgement. It was about time I started to realize that the genocidal “TERFs” I kept hearing about included roughly half the feminists I was following, and once seen the glaring contrast between these women’s actual words and the words put into their mouth by the TRA could not be unseen. There was no going back after that.
In one episode of the original Cosmos series (there is a point to all this, I promise), Carl Sagan talked about how there were at one time people speculating that the surface of Venus was a swamp and maybe even inhabited by dinosaurs. When you looked at Venus through the best telescopes available at the time, it appeared to be completely featureless, so apparently the thinking went something like:
I think the way TRAs get from “this feminist said xyz” to “phobias”, “hate”, “denying our right to exist”, ” violence”, “murder”, “genocide” etc. is very similar to the way those people got from “I can’t see a thing” to “Dinosaurs”. As I keep saying it’s never about what the alleged “TERF” actually said. It’s only ever about what the thing she said supposedly implies as seen through the distorting lens of a million unstated premises and only at the other end of a long chain of impossibly sloppy inferences and extrapolations (involving word-magic, mindreading etc.). Yet when people like Jones report on the latest internet showtrial against feminist thoughtcriminals, they invariably skip right past the million unstated premises and impossibly sloppy inferences and go straight to the “supposedly implies” part as if it had already been established more firmly the the laws of thermodynamics, such that the only question left to consider is how severe the punishment needs to be. As Not Bruce keeps pointing out, if they had any real examples of feminists spouting “hate”, denying trans people’s “rights” (including the “right to exist”), advocating “violence” and even “genocide”, etc. they would use it for everything it was worth. The reason they keep focusing on – never mind “first world problems”, or even “luxury problems”, these are “Utopia” problems! – like the technically accurate use of pronouns (!) or a popular author of young adult literature writing one of the least hateful things I have ever read*, is because that’s all they have. That’s the nothing that their dinosaurs ultimately boils down to.
* All that effort just to make the point that sexism was a non-issue…
** Certainly orders of magnitude less hateful than anything I have ever read by a TRA.
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In the case of Venus I don’t *think* anyone suggested this was anything more than speculation that wasn’t precluded by the available evidence, and it made for a good setting for adventure stories.
Which makes it considerably more honest than the accusations you mention.