3xBork

So for me it comes down to how long they stick to that narrative before admitting that maybe we weren’t exaggerating.

They usually never do. Just at some point they start declaring they always thought so, too.

They exist. They're just not recognized as comedians by those not in the cult because normal people don't see kicking down as humor.

Ain't that right. Going through it with our first this week and I get it. Of course the little guy is ticked off. He's feeling all of the confusion and tiredness we are without knowing or enjoying any of the benefits.

I don't because they're not really comparable. Not in their intended effect nor their feasibility.

There are many other electrics cars, many of them better and/or cheaper and entirely interchangable. Boycotting Tesla just means getting a direct substitute instead. There aren't any substitutes for HP games because the IP itself is the whole point.

Another point where they're not comparable: Tesla isn't the problem here, Elon is and he needs to go. And he can be gotten rid of, which is the entire point of the boycot. Meanwhile, there is no mechanism legal or otherwise to remove Rowling from the equation. She owns the IP and no amount of boycots will change that. The only thing boycotting HP products achieves is making the companies involved fail and preventing any further HP products from being developed. So what does that achieve?

Finally: we are talking about a woman saying mean things about trans people on the Internet versus a man actively dragging the USA into fascism as if these are equal problems requiring equal responses. As much as I empathise with trans people in that this issue can be much more real for them than it is for me, I still don't think they're anywhere near the same level of urgency. I have yet to see Rowling have any kind of meaningful effect, while Elon is currently rampaging through every institution he can reach.

So: given that boycotting Tesla is both easy, effective and urgent, while boycotting HP is a personal sacrifice for no real effect, surely you see the difference?

Yeah so are about a thousand other people who worked on the franchise/product in question and may be very positive influences on the world.

Trying to deny a literal billionaire money is symbolic at best.

Rowling has enough money to donate to shitty politics for the rest of her life ten times over.

Attempts to "not support her" are about 3 decades too late and entirely irrelevant at this point beyond making people feel good about themselves. She doesn't need your support nor even registers it.

We're talking about the world's first and only writer to become a billionaire with her books here.

There's about a thousand and one other people involved with the franchise after 8 movies, 3 spinoff movies, a play and a dozen or so videogames.

Rowling is pretty much irrelevant to the fandom and people aren't into the HP stuff because of her.

I'm not saying they're my ally or the solution to the internet. They're a platform that is currently not containing as many nazis.

If a bar I'm in has aggressively drunk dudes in it, I can just go to the next bar over and have a good time. That bar doesn't have to be fundamentally impervious to aggressive drunk dudes for this to be true and useful.

Yeah you just can't be in a server room anymore without some dude trying to sell you on Office365 and Cortana, sigh.

It's less uneducated thinking and more "here's a thing I read online that I can parrot to show that I am more rational than others".

That statistic could be entirely unfounded and people would still be repeating it because it serves their purposes. Internet nerds love gotchas.

That aside, fully agreed regarding the level of control. It's a little like saying "people have - and therefore you have - an x% chance of getting lung cancer" while completing ignoring that a huge portion of that is a direct result of only some people's behaviour, namely smoking.

The people driving defensively, sober and attentively are not likely to be the ones folding themselves around a roadside tree.

Not really. But you know, gotta find ways to feel smarter than other people so here we go.

Yeah just like the "bank run" on FTX wasn't what caused it to go bankrupt, it was actually the owner's hubris.

In much the same way that the fire didn't burn the house down, it was the tenant buying matches four days earlier.

If you're willing to go that many levels down to get to the root cause of an event you might as well say the nazis being humans is what caused the collapse.