What do we make of Margaret Atwood's free speech intervention?

[RoyalCorgi]

Robust article from Atwood on free speech, in the wake of the Rushdie attack:

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/aug/15/salman-rushdie-free-speech-tyranny-satanic-verses

But she's also been supportive of the trans madness in the past. Does she understand the extent to which trans activists want to silence dissenters?

I think that really falls nito an area where most people, even those who are reasonably historically knowledgeable, may find what he says surprising. The extent to which many just think - left wing, socialism, about being kind and caring for people. Right wing, conservative, about being selfish and throwing people to the wolves.

This has been a real blind spot for many people on the left, and we see it on the boards all the time. It also comes in when you see things, for example, where people talk about Brexit, or immigration - the assumptions made about motivation are pretty flat.

I don't think it's so much about ignorance of specific countries or regimes. All history and contemporary politics are presented through a lens of progress (sometimes called the Whig view of history). Anything that does not fit that narrative tends to be excluded. We love talking about Nazis because they were unambiguously bad, because WW2 was a rare example of 'a good war', and also because we won. Our relationship with Russia/the USSR is more complex, alternatively our ally and our enemy, and with ideological overlap between the stated aims of the USSR (which were very different from the reality, of course), and western European social democracy.

All history and contemporary politics are presented through a lens of progress

Mary Harrington was an interesting interviewee on that point of progress and whether it is the inevitable arc of history (I paraphrase). (Triggernometry again.)

Thread about the interview: www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/4297556-The-reactionary-Feminist-Mary-Harrington-brilliant-interview-on-Triggernometry?

and aparallaxia's post in particular

www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4297556-The-reactionary-Feminist-Mary-Harrington-brilliant-interview-on-Triggernometry?reply=109172163

Atwood has an ego the size of a planetary system. She's so used to being feted as Canada's greatest living person that she labours under a delusion that everything she has to say about anything is important.I don't like her as a writer and the more I find out about her as a person I don't like her as a person.

The article is a tardy, stating the bleedin' obvious promotion of Atwood.

Bits of it are just nonsense but she has to shoe horn them in to show how right thinking and liberal she is. Examples below.

Once a yawn-making liberal platitude, this concept has now become a hot-button issue, since the extreme right has attempted to kidnap it in the service of libel, lies and hatred, and the extreme left has tried to toss it out the window in the service of its version of earthly perfection.

She might care to ponder on the fact that when the original fatwa was proclaimled against Rushdie that in the UK support came from the Right. Atwood I fear has a very limited understanding of right wing and extreme right wing. I expect anyone not sharing her "liberal" values is an unacceptable right winger.

www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/today-everyone-wants-to-defend-salman-rushdie-it-was-not-always-like-that-8168064.html

The one about ballet is so crass it's just embarrassing really.

Long ago, a Canadian member of parliament described a ballet as “a bunch of fruits jumping around in long underwear”. Let them jump, say I

Yeah, I agree, TheLass. I think her books are really over-rated. Even THT.