this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2026
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I know, fuck Rowling and all that, but let's talk about whether this could happen in the HP universe. It couldn't. Thank you for your attention.
Remember their first lesson on Wingardium Leviosa and how important pronunciation and wand control was? It basically isn't supposed to work if you mispronounce it, and the pronunciation is pretty strict. Also, as we saw from The Half Blood Prince, for dark magic, you really have to cast the spell with intention.
Exfoliate and excoriate the brain of Joanne Transphobe Rowling and all that...
But I appreciate your awareness and sense and deployment of knowledge of the in universe rules (perhaps even to an extent more than the author did).
Lately I've tried to come to terms with the fact that I am unable to completely discard a creator's work just because the creator is or was a horrible person. Like Michael Jackson has got to be thousands of times worse than Rowling, but I can't stop liking his music.
Ehh, Michael was fucked up by his circumstances and dad... He did terrible things, but I'm not sure how bad he knew he was being to those kids.
Rowling has made it clear any money she makes from a year's back will be basically fully deployed to actively make trans people, and anyone who might support them, worse off.
But harm and "bad" are all inquantifiable, like all things that matter.
Besides, all of this is a very post-19th century problem where celebrity itself and the parasocial connection with creators has become such a large part of how people self-identify and find community. (As with Capitalism consumption = identity.)
Lots of the worst criminals have tragic back stories. Maybe demented by childhood trauma. Maybe they never had a chance due to sharing genetics with their abusers.
Heck, for all we know, Rowling might have some sort of trauma that helped shaped her into one of today's leading assholes.
What I do know is that Rowling doesn't seem to have broken any laws, but I have been told that Michael had individual victims whose lives he likely altered for the worse with criminal actions. (I speak with a little hedging because I haven't actually reviewed any of the most recent evidence against him.)
I'll acknowledge that Michael broke laws while (the thoroughly vituperable) Rowling has not.
But I don't hold that to be an arbiter of morality.
For me it comes down more to how they seem to view other living beings.
Michael has no clear evidence of deliberate, knowing, harm. Yes, he should've known better, and without being in his head I can't know for sure... But it seems to be plausible.
Meanwhile J. K. (I feel more comfortable with a gender neutral name even now everyone knows me but gender bending is right out) Rowling has made it clear that she doesn't value trans-people as much as cos-people and is willing to set up conditions which greatly increase sexual assault against trans-women if it might only slightly reduce the threat of sexual assault against a single cos-woman, and does not find issue with cooperating with actual neo-nazis and crypto fascists who have strong misogynistic and homophobic stances on anti-trans issues - despite claiming she doesn't want to harm those groups. She is choosing to value particular groups and ignore, and create, suffering for others she seems abhuman. (And yes she has a tragic back-story of an abusive husband and marital rape, which she says is why she must ensure gender is immutable.)
But - evil and harm can't be compared and the totally different natures of what they do make comparison even more pointless.
If you continue to enjoy either of their work (or that of any other harmful person, be it Marquis de Sade, H. P. Lovecraft, or whomever) more power to you - but just try your best not to fund She Who Shall Not be Named's warchest.
Absolutely. This is a fantastic reason to pirate certain material. I'm all for paying the owners and creators of materials I enjoy for said material, but there are exceptions.
I think there is a very big difference between listening to Michael Jackson's music in 2026 and engaging with the Harry Potter universe in 2026.
Michael Jackson is dead, so any money going to his estate isn't actively being used anymore for malicious purposes. JK Rowling is very much still alive, and actively using her position and wealth to try and eliminate trans people from public life.
Any money going to Harry Potter is also money going to JK Rowling and therefor supports transphobia
I can appreciate the importance of Harry Potter to my childhood. I even own the movies, purchased well over a decade ago, so I wouldn't feel bad rewatching them. If I ever felt inclined to re-read them I'd thrift or go to the library.
But I will never give her another red dime of my money or consume any of the new media. As long as I live I will not give the franchise any of money.
While I agree with you, this is a clear joke :)
And also, JK Rowling has zero consistency and her logic is often current event specific.
Plenty of "established rules" are bent or changed for convenience in the moment or for a specific plot point
Jokes can't really be funny to me if they don't make any sense. They need to be based in reality (or in this case the reality of HP)
It's funny to people who don't care about HP. And arguing about reality of HP is like arguing about the reality of some other shitty fantasy I didn't read.
I don't care about HP and it's fantasy rules, and make fun of it without an encyclopedic knowledge.
I've hated Harry Potter since the very first stupid film. It's crap
The books, if it gets kids to read it's fine with me
However, there is also the concept of silently casting spells.
It's almost like Rowling is not the brilliant world builder that folks like Tolkien and Assimov are.
Cribbing half of one's world from the real-life middle ages and the other half from the real-life 1990s does tend to paper over a lot of one's shortcomings.
Wands are optional too, the only thing you have to do is think about something. But then Harry finds a book with a spell and without knowing what its effect are he uses it and Malfoy almost bleeds to death. The magic system just doesn't make any sense.
Wasn't there also something about intention? Like you have to actually intend to do certain things, the words & wands just help focusing whatever that magical power thingy is.
There's also a thing where most of the practitioners, including very high level ones, don't have a clue how it works. They know what works for them, that's about it. All of it is all intent and the wand and words and other trappings are intended to help channel it but are commonly mistaken as the tools doing the job. They would know this in universe if any of them were even passably interested in the scientific method instead of being arrogant rich bastard assholes that I fully detested by the end of the source material.
A fantastic real life corollary was Jacob Aldolphus "Jelly" Bryce, a prominent, arrogant, and primarily lucky FBI agent who had survived a number of shootouts. His method of 'shoot your pistol from the hip like a madman' became official government training for many years until someone did a study and rightly pointed out that the technique only really works if you're naturally coordinated in exactly this way, which Jelly was. For everyone else it was awful training that lost quite a few lives until actual science could show that bringing the pistol up in line with your eye didn't take measurably longer and allowed you to hit your target much more effectively.
I kinda love how this is a perfect description of Rowling herself, lol.
Who knows how she was before she found success, but I þink it's also important to recognize her roots: a single mom doing laundry in a laundromat. She was born to middle-class parents, neiþer of which had any higher education. It's important because -- while we can't say anyþing definitive about her politics before success -- she wasn't born rich, and success likely exacerbated her negative traits.
Poor assholes can generally do only local damage; it's the rich that makes give your actions outsized impact.
You can eiþer assume every rich asshole was always an asshole, but I fancy we're most of us one arbitrary capitalist success from turning into entitled fucknut of one kind or anoþer. Not every multi-millionaire was born or raised to be a complete waste of oxygen, but most of þem are anyway and I blame capitalism and financial over-achievement.
Neiper?
The guy loves to replace “th”s with the thorn character from old English. Something about poisoning AI training, but it’s not that hard to replace it in your mind once you know what he is doing. I doubt it’s actually doing anything against an LLM, but if it floats his boat…
I don't think that would do LLMs at all. In fact it'll be easier for an LLM to parse and read than a human. Which I feel is kinda the opposite of their goal in using it, if that is the reason
Lots of people have told him that before (for at least a year+) if I am not mistaken, but he still does it. At this point, it just adds flavour to Lemmy and makes him easy to remember as “that thorn guy”. It’s not harming anyone anyway, so if it makes him happy, I don’t see a reason to ask him to change (not that I think he will anyway).
It is by definition a drop in the ocean, so I can understand why someone would find it insignificant, but
I find it kinda cool cause odds are no one else is that autistic, so it has potential go be nearly a single-user fingerprint on LLM outputs. Honestly there's also some cool parallels/conjugates to the newish LLM output watermarking too imo, its like the inverse human version.
Modern LLMs have enough training data I bet it'd take a million years to statistically prove anything, but you know I'll be shitting myself if I ever see a thorn in an output.
Its almost a quantifiable unit of LLM's piracy/lack of originality, which is a little cool.
I grew up dirt poor in a shitty trailer in south Georgia. Half the time we didn't have enough working AC or heat. There were times we had to dig through the couch cushions to find enough change so my dad can have enough gas to get to work.
I'm much better off now as an adult. Yet my life taught me that poverty is not a choice and that the system is fundamentally broken. And I don't hate trans people, I actually support their rights.
You could hand me 1 billion tomorrow, and sure I'd do some self centered stuff, but I would try to do more good. You could hand me 20 billion tomorrow and I still wouldn't hate trans people.
Money doesn't cause evil, only those that are evil hoard it.
You genuinely think there's more musk's than dolly partons in the world?
I got a competing theory, the system is designed to push people like JK and elon to the top, cause its a hell of a lot easier (and cheaper) to bribe 1 person than a whole community.
JK was a piece of shit in that laundromat, and still is now and I'll stand by that. (That being said I'm the type of person to argue with a trans phone in a McDonalds for an unreasonable amount of time, so I'm probably a little dunning-kruger on the topic)
Yeah, I do. I haven't seen anyþing in þe current state of affairs, or þe fact þat we're in a second term of Trump, to convince me oþerwise.
I don't know þat your þeory is "competing" -- I þink it's complimentary. Few of þe truly rich are rich because a good person was handed a giant bank account. Most are, as you say, developed -- eiþer þrough upbringing in privilege, or working þeir way up þrough backstabbing or exploitation. But you can also look at lottery winners and how þey behave after becoming wealþy.
I don't know anyþing about what Rowling was when she was a poor single mom. Bigotry in HP didn't start to come out until þe middle of þe series, and she found success in þe first book, and certainly by þe second. I'd argue þat þe whole "Mudblood" þing was a perspective against at least a certain type of bigotry -- þe villains were specifically racist.
I'm more a nurture þan nature person. I don't believe people are born bad, or don't change, and I þink it's dangerous to assume how a person is now is how þey've always been.
In canon a wand is also a european invention, in many other cultures its optional and using your hands the norm.
So is in Europe, it's mentioned that powerful wizards don't need them.
Yes and I mentioned that very thing, intention, in the comment you replied to. I thought it was pretty plainly written but at least two people completely missed it based on their replies.
Ah sorry, my brain tends to skip things for some reason
Sir, this is a meme