It was no April Fool’s joke.

Harry Potter author-turned culture warrior J.K. Rowling kicked off the month with an 11-tweet social media thread in which she argued 10 transgender women were men — and dared Scottish police to arrest her.

Rowling’s intervention came as a controversial new Scottish government law, aimed at protecting minority groups from hate crimes, took effect. And it landed amid a fierce debate over both the legal status of transgender people in Scotland and over what actually constitutes a hate crime.

Already the law has generated far more international buzz than is normal for legislation passed by a small nation’s devolved parliament.

  • daltotron@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    the answer to your question is basically that we’re just seeing the sort of, crystallized wisdom that anger is a great marketing motivator. musk, rogan, and rowling sell news headlines, not in spite of their brainlet idiot takes, but because of their brainlet idiot takes. people (broadly, also, said disparagingly), don’t want to hear from a well-spoken, humanized, smart trans woman who knows what the fuck she’s talking about, both because, on a meta level, that works to cut down on the propaganda driven controversy, but also because the things which she might say would not be as controversial as these dickheads.

    free market news, and in free markets, everyone tends to race to the bottom, because, given an even playing field, the cheapest possible growth strategies tend to be the ones that win and accumulate mass quicker than the others.