Can it really be considered “relatively benign” when an extremely famous public figure is calling for people who disagree with them to be shot?
I can't speak for Blow, but that definitely seems to accurately describe the arc Rowling has taken over the last 7-8 years.
What a bizarre time we are living in when "men aren't women" and "women should have single-sex spaces and rape crisis centres" are considered extreme views.
Beware anyone who claims to represent "all" of some large diverse group, such as "Women" or "Floridians".
"Women should have single sex spaces" turns out to be used to justify, "It's OK to be hateful and even violent against women in these spaces so long as your excuse is that you believe they're not actually women" which is bullshit.
Years ago, when I wasn't too tired to spend all day and half the night dancing, I went to Bang Face Weekender - basically imagine a huge multi-room club night except for days and days. I keep the socials for it available because hey, it's a nice memory. This sort of "Single sex spaces" bullshit caused a problem for the last-but-one Bang Face because a new-to-this Security outfit somehow decided it's their job to go remove people who in their view weren't women from a toilet for women. These women weren't causing any problems for anybody else, but because they presumably had the wrong genitals or for some other reason were "suspect" to that Security team, Security dragged them out of a toilet cubicle and threw them out of the site. Other clubbers were of course horrified, and the event runners had to apologise to everybody - because regardless of how many X chromosomes you have, or whether you do or don't have a womb, dragging people out of the toilets because you've got weird ideas about what is or isn't a woman is batshit.
As for Bang Face last year, what happened is that security staff kicked a group of males out from the women's toilets. I agree that this isn't an ideal outcome, much better would have been if these men had respected that women's spaces are not for them, and stayed out in the first place. The fact that their removal was treated as some sort of scandal shows how far we've lost sight of the rights of women and girls to have single-sex provisions.
I think this is letting people off the hook. We're talking about adults in their 40s and 50s here. When people like that 'suddenly' endorse extreme views it's because they had held them back and feel enabled to say them now, an adult isn't going to become an extremist because someone was mean to them online.
I'm 20 years younger than Blow and even at my age I can tell I'm settled enough psychologically that adopting radically different views would require a lot of internal effort. Views don't exist in a vacuum, to believe radical things you have to radically alter all the other things you belief. I really don't think we should people like this like children without agency.
>drives them to support much more extreme views, like what you are describing, that they otherwise might not have.
The view I mentioned was the one that got Notch (one of the public figures mentioned by GP) the reaction from the internet in the first place. A bit disingenuous to say this was a moderate conservative talking point before he got sent spiraling into a far right abyss by an angry progressive mob.
I'm not saying these people were rays of sunshine before, I'm saying they could be talked to without them foaming at the mouth and you face palming at how unhinged they were. I was using the meaning of benign attached to tumors.
I am not an expert either, if that episode occurred later than I remember, it could have been as you say.
