Skip to main content

Stick to your guns, J K Rowling

I'd like to express support for J K Rowling's right to express her thoughts - on anything - if they are considered, based on her experience and not motivated by hate, fear, or a desire to cause harm.

 We each find the world as we find the world. Better people think about things they find. The best try to improve the human condition.

 Let me say now that my interest in LGBT matters is about the same as my interest in the Balinese copra trade of the thirteenth century, but I don't think sex sexual preferences should be the basis of discrimination.

 J K Rowling is the target of the Schadenfreude Stasi for no legitimate reason. Free societies enable their residents to express personal opinions, and that is all that she has done.

 The problem goes back to the observation made many year ago by William F. Buckley, Jr. when he noted:

 Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.

 The intolerance of other views is why there have been so many surprise election results over the past decade: people tell the pollsters one thing and then do another.

 Stick to your guns, Jo.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Spirit of the North: One Knock for Yes!

Ian Thomson ’ s Northern Trilogy (beginning with The Northern Elements and Northern Flames ) weaves history, nostalgia, and autobiography into highly engaging and thought-provoking tales. Spirit of the North is no different in that, but it is different. The plot looks at three episodes of spiritualism, two relatively harmless, and one with serious consequences. While the first two are reminiscent of Agatha Christiesque table-turning, the third involves murder. This is the one that leads to a serious investigation by Tom Catlow with his childhood friend, Will Melling, playing Watson. Readers met these two mischievous friends in The Northern Elements . Tom is a retired police Senior Scientific Officer (Forensics) and Will a former sports journalist. Now to fill their time, Tom and Will investigate another very old case while continuing their friendship with teasing and banter. The third main character is long-dead. Cornelius Pickup, was a successful businessman, kind employer, a...
Post a Comment
Read more

Jonathan Creek Revisted

  Having watched the last episode of The Capture,  I was looking for something equally intriguing but not as frightening. I decided to re-watch the old episodes of Jonathan Creek . Like everyone else, I have my favourite episodes and they are enhanced by the actors and settings. The series had the ability to draw one in and make everything seem possible, if unlikely. However, the re-watching exercise only reinforced my view that Maddy Magellan was possibly the most irritating character who has been on television in more than a generation. I can throw the usual abuse at her, but her most egregious sins are that she is irredeemably selfish and, throughout the series, she never learns anything . She appears in 18 episodes and is as stupid in the last as she was in the first. Her selfishness not infrequently crosses the line from being mildly amusing to downright mean. For all of her emancipated liberalism, she is an objectionable human being (I leave it others to decide whether t...
Post a Comment
Read more

First Lines

First lines are first impressions Teachers of creative writing are always bleating about the importance of first lines. They're not wrong, but a first line isn't make-or-break. Many excellent novels have indifferent first lines, but their significance is often created by the fact that they are the opening lines of great books; they are not great books because they have killer opening lines. Consider the first line of Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities . it rambles on for 119 words, and demonstrates that Dickens had no understanding of the semi-colon. Most people can only remember the first dozen words; show-offs know the first two dozen. Dickens was being paid by the word, and was a master at turning one good idea into a whole chapter. (Don't misunderstand me: A Tale of Two Cities is one of my favourite books.) First lines are like book titles. They can take a while for the writer to feel satisfied with them, but often, they don't really matter. When asked what he...
2 comments
Read more