The European Union blocked her recent tweets denying the crimes of the Nazis against Trans People and the destruction of the Institute for Sexual Research.

She will probably be banned from entering the EU or heavily fined.

Germany is now examining the situation and if they will take action.

She could be arrested for this as Germany has used treatises to arrest non-german citizens in other countries for Holocaust Denial.

In my opinion it's freedom of speech despite that it's horrible. But then thay little communist inside me is asking, "what if she wasn't rich and famous and said all this?"

I think if she weren't picking on trans people but some other group she'd already have been arrested. And another thing that makes me not want to defend her is hypocrisy about what is recognized as hate speech.

Everything she said would have gotten her in hate speech row if it weren't for the fame she has and the double standard against transgender people.

I'll say it's free speech but also if we are making hate speech illegal it should apply to everyone like all law.

7951351
Sadly, no amount of money can buy a person intelligence. Then again, her works are rife with antisemitic and transphobic stereotypes so this doesn't really surprise me.

Freedom of Speech is never freedom from consequences.

7951363
Not to mention the racism, slavery apologetics, pro-imperialism, and copaganda stuff in the books as well.

7951392
Mercifully the movies cut a lot of the problematic stuff. But how did it take us so long to realise she's such an awful person?

I know for a fact that if I have kids I will never permit them to read her works. I'll introduce them to Tolkien instead.

7951396
Because reading as kids, you don't have the experience to notice the more problematic stuff; and a lot of it is very culturally prevalent, so it's not always obvious how bad it is, since you're used to hearing it from a lot of different sources.

As much as I love Tolkien, he did have a few problems of his own; although that's less prevalent in the books than his other writings.

7951402
True, though I would argue Middle Earth is largely free of some of Tolkien's more problematic beliefs.

But on Rowling, I think this quote sums this situation up well:

Every time Rowling tweets, the first part of her obituary gets shorter and the second part gets longer.

-shaun_vids

7951406
Yeah, a lot less of it shows up in his works; and some of it you have to dig a bit to see it.

I like Shaun, he's got some good stuff.

7951363
Ron White said during one of his stand up specials, "you can't fix stupid".

This is yet more proof of that.

7951376
Well said Seven.

With freedom must come responsibility, and sensitivity too.

7951412
Agreed.

7951432
Agreed. Not to mention her hoarding habits. She really has lived long enough to become the villain.

7951442
It's more likely she already was the "villain" and it just started showing due to the notoriety.

7951489
Hmm, That's one way of putting it.

7951491
Crap like this typically isn't new coming from these people. It tends to be "baked in" so to speak.

7951493
True. But it still hit quite hard for Potter fans regardless.

7951496
-Potter fan myself here- Yeah I'll admit... I'm still trying to fathom that.

But hey.... I'm still staying in the Harry Potter fanbase regardless of what tends to happen though. ^^

7951515
Here's an article from 2020 on the topic. I'll quote what I think is quite an important bit:

Harry Potter is simply too big a cultural landmark to jettison. I don’t believe anyone wants to mind-wipe Harry Potter’s existence from the world; it means too much to too many of us. (Let’s leave aside the nonsensical whatever of Rowling’s Fantastic Beasts films.) But I also find myself bristling at the jokes that have invaded social media in the wake of Rowling’s comments — the ones fantasizing that the Harry Potter books magically appeared unto us with no author, or that they were written by someone else we like better. Sure, the author is dead, but that idea is about reclaiming agency over our own interpretation of a text. It paradoxically depends on the author having a proprietary interpretation of their own work — one that we can then reject.

That’s important, because despite its flaws, Harry Potter has influenced generations of kids to grow into progressives who then turned out to be more progressive than the books themselves and the woman who authored them. The series embodies what people in fandom mean when we say that fandom is transformative: The fans who sorted themselves into Hogwarts houses, sewed cosplay, wrote fanfic, played Quidditch, swarmed stores for midnight book launches — they did all of that, not J.K. Rowling. Their passion made Harry Potter into the cultural phenomenon it is today.

By repudiating Rowling’s anti-trans comments, millions of Harry Potter fans are also turning the series into a symbol of the power of a collective voice to drown out an individual one. The power of fans’ love and empathy for trans people and other vulnerable communities, and their steady rejection of Rowling’s prejudice, is a potent, raw form of cancellation — one undertaken not out of a spirit of scorn and ostracism, but with something closer to real grief — and it deserves to be a part of the story of Harry Potter.

But if we can’t erase Rowling, what can we do instead? We can break up with her.

We can grieve, nurse our wounds, and be sad we loved someone who hurt us so badly. We can celebrate happier times while mourning a relationship we outgrew — one that became toxic — and regretting the time we spent waiting for a problematic fave to change and grow. We can give ourselves time to heal. And we can consider accepting that the microaggressions we may have noticed in Rowling’s books themselves were, perhaps, warning signs obscured by a benevolent, liberal exterior.

Jo can keep the money, and Pottermore and Cormoran Strike, and definitely all of Fantastic Beasts. She can keep the house elves who really love their enslavement, the anti-Semitic goblin stereotypes, Dolores Umbridge, Voldemort, the Dementors, and Rita Skeeter. I’ll take Harry and Hermione and Ron and Draco, Luna and Neville and Dumbledore’s Army. I’ll take Hogwarts and pumpkin pasties and butterbeer and Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes, and every other moment of magic and love this series has given me and countless others.

Trans and queer Harry Potter fans get to keep Tonks and Remus and Sirius Black and Charlie Weasley and Draco, because I say so; Harry Potter is ours now, and we make the rules. J.K. Rowling lost custody over her kids and now we can spoil them, let them get tattoos, express themselves however they want, love whomever they want, transition if they want, practice as much radical empathy and anarchy as they want. They're anything you want and need them to be, because they were always for you.

As for me, I won’t be reading or rereading Harry Potter anytime soon. Instead, I have endless Harry Potter fanfiction and novels written by Harry Potter fans who grew up to create their own worlds. Above all, I have the Wizarding World that lives on in my heart — queer, genderqueer, deviant, diverse, and currently defunding the Aurors.

That’s the Harry Potter we all created together, without J.K. Rowling. And we all know that’s the version that matters, in the end.

7951496
Well, there is no getting around that sadly.

7951376
Yeah society should be able to democratically decide what things they want promoted. Despite the term cancel culture, society has always shunned some and uplifted others.

7951518
and we can do the same thing that we did to H.P.Lovecraft

7951627
Precisely. We jettisoned his problematic views on race and kept the mythology to build as our own.

7951637

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4:15-4:40