Wow, I'm glad we don't have to choose one of these two to root for. Like obviously it's noted TERF and walking example of the struggle to separate the art from the artist J.K. Rowling, but I mean, she's arguing with a guy who's trying his best to start World War III.
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"I kill your friends and family to remind you of my love. Da-da-da, dat-da, dat, da-da-da, da-ya-da..."
-Russian President Vladimir Putin |
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I mean, if it's going so badly that your troops are running over their own commanders with tanks, yeah, I think calamitous is the word. |
Huh? What am I even talking about? Yeah, sorry, I guess I rely too much on this dumb in medias res opening to my posts where I start talking, pretend that you interrupt me with a "Huh?" and then go back and explain what I'm talking about. I can't promise that I'll knock it off, but I'll
say that I'll promise to knock it off. Anyway, I'm talking about Vladimir Putin
comparing the backlash against him for his unprovoked and thus far calamitous (for both sides) war against Ukraine to the backlash against J.K. Rowling for her unprovoked and shitty opinions about trans people.
After a
meandering rant against U.S. culture for largely ignoring the Soviet role in defeating Nazi Germany (which is kind of fair, we do love to pretend that we single-handedly won the war), Putin went on to complain that:
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Pictured: Sergey Rachmaninov, the real victim here. |
"They canceled Joanne Rowling...just because she didn't satisfy the demands of gender rights. They're trying to cancel our country. I'm talking about the progressive discrimination of everything to do with Russia...They're now engaging in the cancel culture, even removing Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich and Rachmaninov from posters.
-Vlademir Putin, on the tragic removal of dead
Russian composers from posters...or something
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Russian President Vladimir Putin hard at work on his debut children's book: "Give me Everything I Want or I Shall Bomb Your Cities to Rubble." |
So couple of things. I guess I'm not a hundred percent sure what cancel culture is. If someone, say an author, does or says something shitty, like, I don't know, publicly attacking trans women, and it changes how we perceive them so much so that maybe we no longer want to engage with their works, is that cancel culture? Because it sounds to me like what just happens when a famous person does or says something shitty, and it changes how we feel about them. Secondly, we're not boycotting Putin's children book so much as we're recoiling in horror at how he made murderers of the Russian military.
He went on to explain how a decline in appreciation for Russian culture in the wake of his brutal, and ridiculous war is basically the same thing as Nazi book burning:
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Is it though? Impossible to imagine? Because I'm pretty sure he banned Twitter because of all the bombed out buildings. |
"It's now the latest program to cancel world literature was conducted by the Nazi's 90 years ago. We remember the footage of them burning books. It's impossible to imagine such a thing in our country. We're ensured against this thanks to our culture. And it's inseparable to us from our motherland, and from Russia where there is no place for ethnic intolerance."
-Putin, with a bone-chilling
absence of irony
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Specifically the kind of boat that is lifted, along with other boats, by the same rising tide, Joanne.... |
Which...I mean, seriously? Uncomfortably, I'm actually going to have to agree with J.K. "But Sadly Not Just Kidding" Rowling, when
she responded to Putin's suggestion that they're in the same boat:
"Critiques of Western cancel culture are possibly not best made by those currently slaughtering civilians for the crime of resistance, or who jail and poison their critics."
-J.K. Rowling, being somewhat
less wrong than usual
Obviously critiques of Western cancel culture are also not great coming from someone who attacks an already at-risk community, but I suppose she's never bombed non-combatants either so in this one, incredibly specific instance in which it's a choice between a trans exclusionary radical feminist and an ex-KGB autocrat who is, as I type this, insisting that he's got a right to drop nuclear bombs on anyone he choose on the bases of any threat regardless of how minor or imagined, I'm going to say Rowling. And then go shower.
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Russia under Putin is basically the assault-rifle-weilding "Stand Your Ground" gun-nut of the international stage. |
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