May I please ask what it would take for you to consider Rowling as problematic and the material not worth consuming? Apparent ties to Epstein and funding anti trans hate groups in the uk that have actually affected our laws aside. There is some rather unfortunate content in the antisemitic caricatures that the goblins ended up becoming, and the very yikes inducing naming conventions from Cho (not a first name, it’s more of a Korean last name) Chang, and Seamus Finnegan, to Kingsley Shacklebolt. Does this affect your enjoyment of the series at all? Genuinely curious.
Hey, sorry for the late reply, I was doing a 72hr social media detox. Thank you so much for the genuine ask, a lot of people just send shit like "kill yourself terf" or "TRANSGENDER BEAM BOOOSH" and it gets pretty discouraging and annoying.
Let me preface this by saying: I used to be very anti-rowling because of what I had been told about her, and Harry Potter was pretty well ruined for me. I'm well aware of her controversies. At some point, I got curious about what she actually said rather than what people were telling me she said. I fact-checked and cross-referenced to hell and back, and once I did that, none of it made sense anymore, so I drew my own conclusions.
Long post, beware if you're not up for it (contains embedded sources).
First of all, the Files: She wasn't actually affiliated with Epstein, if you actually look at it. This post does it better than I could.
Anti-trans hate groups? She doesn't fund those. Honestly, I don't even know of any truly hateful groups that formally exist. What she DOES fund is maintaining and boosting women's rights.
-The J.K. Rowling women's fund helps impoverished women get lawyers for assault, wrongful termination, etc.
-Beira's place is a single-sex women's rape shelter that still accepts trans men on the basis of biological sex.
-For Women Scotland is an organization dedicated to women's and children's rights.
Frankly, i don't understand how these organizations can even be remotely seen as hateful. They work on the basis of biological realities, and that's it. As far as I'm aware, but please correct me if I'm wrong, no trans rights have been affected and every trans person is still legally and medically protected under the rights of their biological sex.
Goblins were anti-semitic stereotypes well before Harry Potter. Unfortunately, these stereotypes are often forgotten and undocumented, so she likely assumed Goblins were just Goblins, as most people would. I've seen a lot of people point out the "Star of David" on the floor in the movies, but that's literally not true. It's the floor pattern of the building where they filmed, in an Australian diplomatic house. A six-pointed star is not automatically Jewish.
The name "Cho Chang" is not technically an incorrect anglicization of the name, though it's not a widely recognized one. I'm not Chinese so, once again, these posts explain it better than I could.
I don't see how Seamus Finnegan is a bad or stereotypical name to have?
-Finnegan wasn't even in the 100 most common Irish surnames in the 90's.
-Seamus is just like. A normal name. He's an Irish character with an Irish name, I really don't understand how people have a problem with this one.
Kingsley Shacklebolt is a socially delicate case. First, I would like to point out that he is portrayed as a highly competent hero character, so it seems that the only potential problem is his surname.
-Shacklebolt is a real aristocratic English surname with no racial connotations, relating more to craftsmanship, though I do understand how it might be perceived. Ultimately, though, that's up to audience interpretation, and given Rowling's general naming conventions, it was likely chosen to embody the character and not as a racial stereotype.
-His first name, Kingsley, suggests royalty, and the actual definition is "King's Meadow", further supporting this interpretation of his surname. It *might* have been a political statement at the time, but only a positive one.
Admittedly, some of her writing may have been unintentionally racist or ableist, but she didn't exactly have easy access to all of human knowledge like we do today, and what was or was not socially acceptable or even to be deeply considered was very different 30-some years ago, so I think some things can be looked past or forgiven. I doubt these things would still be present had Harry Potter been written now rather than in 1990.
Further points about J.K. Rowling and why I don't hate her:
-She helped save 500 female lawyers from the Taliban
-She lost her billionaire status (though she did regain it) due to charity donations and taxes
-She pays her taxes in full
As German forces & eager local collaborators (Poles & Belorussians) moved in to liquidate Braslav ghetto in Belarus, a group of young Jews barricaded themselves inside buildings & opened fire.
With only the few weapons they had managed to smuggle or seize, they fought desperately for hours — holding off the Nazis and local police in a rare documented act of open armed resistance inside a Belarusian ghetto during its final destruction.
Around 3,000 Jews were murdered in Braslav over those few days. But not all went as lambs to the slaughter.
One of those who escaped the initial killings was 19-year-old Tuvia (Tevka) Biliak. He reached the Vilna area, joined the partisans, and risked his life repeatedly smuggling weapons into the Vilna Ghetto. Captured by the Gestapo in August 1943, he was tortured brutally. They wanted names. They got nothing.
Even the infamous SS officer Martin Weiss later admitted he had never seen such a boy. Tevka died under torture at age 19 — silent, unbroken, and defiant to the very end.
In the heart of the Holocaust, in a small Belarusian town few remember today, the Jews of Braslav proved the lie of “lambs to the slaughter.”
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The way modern communist and socialist parties slap "ironic" USSR imagery all over everything they produce does not fill me with confidence in their ability (or even desire) to avoid the violence caused by that regime.
Yall are soooo not ready to hear this but one big step in fixing antisemitism in our society is to stop treating nazism as the pinnacle of all evil and start looking at it as an ideology. Because im on the piss on the poor website I have to clarify here that i dont mean by this that its an acceptable ideology or a good one even though thats pretty obvious. You have to stop treating nazism as a force of nameless faceless evil that encompasses all bigotries and start looking at it for what it is. Nazis are humans and you probably will refuse to deal with your own antisemitism until you acknowledge that fact. The nazis werent some cartoon evil force that hated every oppressed minority but targeted jews more just because. You dont need to compare something to nazi germany to say that its bad. You have to start looking at history and society not as a story of cartoonish good vs evil but as real things being done by real people just like you.
You many have heard of “the last Jew in Yemen” Levi Marhabi it that man.
He was detained in 2016 in connection with the removal of an 800 year old Torah scroll to Israel.
In 2018 he was sentenced on charges unknown to the US Commission on International Religious Freedom to 3.5 years in prison. According to that sentence he should have been released in 2021.
In 2019 a Houthi controlled appellate court ordered his immediate release. This order was ignored by security personnel.
The Houthis used Marhabi’s detainment to remove the last 13 jews from the country in 2021. Telling them if they were to leave he would finally be released. This promise was not fulfilled.
After 10.7.23 Marhabi was placed first in a “more violent” cell block and then after a hunger strike into solitary confinement.
As of late 2024 he is in poor health and reportedly partially paralyzed after a stroke.
There are no updates on his condition as of 2025
It has been 9 years since his arrest in 2016, 7 years since his sentencing in 2018, 6 years since his sentence was overturned in 2019 and 4 years since the forced emigration of the remaining Yemenite Jews in 2021. He has served more than twice his original sentence. He has been subjected to cruel and unusual punishment for that time and has reportedly lost all his teeth as a consequence of repeated beatings.
Today in "Animals that it didn't occur to me might be able to go to the beach and enjoy it, but apparently do and now that I'm seeing it makes perfect sense": Camel!
A restaurant named You're Not Supposed To Be Here, where the whole point is that the vibes are unnerving. The lighting is weird, the whole place has a faint scent that's not a bad smell, but it's certainly not food smell and you can't quite identify what the hell it is. The music is weirdly janky and you can't quite tell what's wrong with it, the vocals aren't exactly garbled but sung in a language you swear you've never heard anywhere and couldn't name if you tried. Only hiring staff who have anxiety and they're 100% permitted to show how much your presence here stresses them out.
Join me on my journey to finally unbalance my hormones, toxify my body, boost my inflammation, maximize my cortisol and absolutely destroy my gut health.
