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.
It’s basically just because he’s like, a moronic ape. He is able to kind of, wear the aesthetics of your everyday college dorm bro, who thinks the dark knight is the greatest movie ever made. Or at least, wear the aesthetics of their middling 30 year old, balding, divorced versions, because that movie came out in like 2008, or whatever. You can basically put him in any context, and he’s able to function as the same idiot self-insert character. He’s the vessel through which they can imagine themselves talking to famous celebrities, academics, comedians, and right wing conspiracy nuts.
Ok but like, do you have to shit on the Dark Knight though?
Yes
i think this has a lot to do with it.
and i think he’s also boosted a lot by the fact that he doesn’t really communicate that many original thoughts. instead, it seems like he tends to blindly agree with whoever he has on camera. so he simultaneously cultivates these personas of “having intellectual curiosity” while also being a stand-in for the average college dorm bro.
(i’m not trying to defend him here, he still causes serious harm by platforming bad actors and endorsing their views.)
I think these are kind of one in the same. College dorm bros, ime, and just your general kind of like libertarian white dude, are pretty vulnerable to JAQing off unintentionally, engaging in a lot of logical fallacies, and priding themselves on a kind of half-baked intellectual curiosity that really just serves to reaffirm their own worldview. It’s how they can square the circle of supporting free speech, and it’s uses, right, while not actually being intellectually curious enough to dig themselves out of their holes through legitimate means. The college dorm bro is closely related to the debate pervert, is basically what I’m saying.