will JK Rowling be arrested when she returns to Scotland?

[dead0man]

2 votes

she's challenging a stupid new anti-free speech law.
https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1774749954629652873?s=20

[Benjamin Frank 2.0]

Does anybody care about a has-been trying to stay in the spotlight?

[TheTide]

Does anybody care about a has-been trying to stay in the spotlight?

Possibly people who post in threads about her.

[Torrain]

The Hate Crimes law is a bit of a mess all round. Badly conceived, but also used by many as evidence of malice on the First Minister’s part that feels more like a right wing conspiracy than reality. Never attribute to malice, what could be attributed to incompetence (he didn’t earn the soubriquet Yousless for nothing).

Shocker of a rollout so far. Humza Yousaf has been subject to more (disingenuous) complaints than JK Rowling so far. Someone made a fake complaint under the name of Community Safety Minister Siobhan Brown, and she spent the morning on the phone with Police Scotland who called to process it.

The implantation of the bill was delayed for several years after passage (in part because enforcement was seen as such an issue), so long that Humza Yousaf, who was Justice Secretary when it passed, had an entire spell as Health Sec and a year as FM before it came into action. That’s also kinda why they can’t reverse-ferret yet. The law was the personal project of the FM when he was Justice Sec, and he faced enough scrutiny for it at the time (he doesn’t even have a law degree, and had incurred a couple of  driving offences at the time), that it would be very embarrassing to turn around now.

So we have to let this play out before it can be amended/improved/repealed.

For their part the Scottish Government has released some very terse statements about how people are misunderstanding the law, and just need to get with the program, and how it’s all fine guys. It’s the kind of dumb “why are the public so angry at us, we’re right?” policy that governments that have been in charge for 17 years seem to excel at.

[CumbrianLefty]

The answer is, of course, "almost certainly not".

[afleitch]

The law is pretty straightforward. It stumps those who don't understand, or who don't wish to understand the law as written and it's precedents. But people don't do nuance. Too much effort.

The 'stirring up of hatred' provisions in law, with regards to race, has been on the books since 1965. There are few prosecutions; less than a dozen in last decade and the bar for the new provisions in even higher. The provisions now cover age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity and sex characteristics. A separate piece of legislation on misogyny is scheduled to be tabled (which I actually have disagreements with as no provision is made for misandry, when equality law should protect all variant characteristics; straights protected by sexual orientation law and people straight but discriminated on the assumption of being gay protected etc)

It must be proved that someone used language 'threatening or abusive' and that they 'intended' to stir up hatred.

Almost identical provisions in England and Wales (reviewed and affirmed by the Law Commission in 2021) have resulted in only a small number of actual convictions.

The law also affirms freedom of expression rights; 'behaviour or material is not to be taken to be threatening or abusive solely on the basis that it involves discussion or criticism of matters' relating to the protected characteristics.

So it sets three very hard tests.

---

We suffer from obfuscation, to put it mildly, because it media attention on the 'never never' and on celebrities, as opposed to the countless legal experts, even from the likes of Tory Professor Adam Tomkins who quite succinctly put the law as it is written and as it applied across to various media outlets over the last few weeks.

It was very clear that this was going to become the issue (to the extent the PM went out to bat against a law that's already in place in England and Wales) and had been trialled over the pst few weeks in the 'concerned press' because it was a piece of Holyrood derived legislation (and backed by all parties except the Tories) and like everything, could be centered around that issue.

[Beet]

Does anybody care about a has-been trying to stay in the spotlight?

Six of the 20 books on Amazon's "most read" fiction list as of right now are authored by her. This list is updated every week.

[Benjamin Frank 2.0]

Does anybody care about a has-been trying to stay in the spotlight?

Six of the 20 books on Amazon's "most read" fiction list as of right now are authored by her. This list is updated every week.

No best sellers in the current Amazon top 50. Sounds like the perfect definition of a 'has been' to me.
https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Literature-Fiction/zgbs/books/17

[dead0man]

Does anybody care about a has-been trying to stay in the spotlight?

LGBT people, obviously, for one.  People who like to troll LGBT is another group that cares.  People who like to watch the trolls troll the LGBT or more specifically, the reaction to it also care, in a way.  And to be fair, it does make for some very funny entertainment.  I guess some of her fans care, but I'm sure they fall into one of the above groups or they don't care about this particular issue and wish she'd just stop.

So like, maybe, what....39% of people care.  Maybe a little less.

[Independents for Nihilism]

If there is a single human being with both the will and the means to fight this law all the way to the highest magistrate in the land, it's ol' Joanne here. And if she doesn't get arrested, she gets to point out a toothless and pointless law. As bizarrely entertaining as kooky British people drama is, I wish I didn't care, either. Never even liked her wizard books.

[SWE]

The law she's criticizing is absurd and makes me proud to live in a liberal democracy as opposed to whatever nightmare they've got going on over in Europe, although I will say if I was trying to imagine the least sympathetic person to make that point it would probably be a billionaire who has a history of taking advantage of her country's lack of basic civil liberty protections to silence people who are mean to her online

[Since I'm the mad scientist proclaimed by myself]

I think she should be arrested for impersonation of a feminist.

[CumbrianLefty]

Impersonation of a novelist, more like

(nah, her stuff isn't really *that* bad)

[Absentee Voting Ghost of Ruin]

"No One Ever Said J. K. Rowling Might Be Jailed for Misgendering" -

A BBC Radio 4 interview with MSP Siobhian Brown was misrepresented in the UK press, then J. K. Rowling went on a transphobic tear, then Caitlyn Jenner amplified the misinformation, and now we’re doing a story on it.

To reiterate, the only people suggesting that misgendering might be a crime under Scotland’s hate crimes legislation are members of the media, Rowling herself, and other anti-trans activists. Legislators responsible for the law had said the opposite, and according to the same BBC Radio 4 program the text of the law itself explicitly includes “a right to offend, shock, or disturb,” which was included to guard against its possible misuse by authorities.

The effects of all of this, in addition to giving Rowling an excuse to target individual trans women with her disgust and anger, seems to have been to encourage spurious reports of hate crimes, including a false report in the name of Siobhan Brown herself. It’s not yet clear who is behind the flood of reports that have swamped the Scottish police, threatening any ability for the law to come into effect and embarrassing its proponents Whoever is responsible, the flood of nuisance reports has clearly been a boon to those who hate trans people, particularly those determined to prevent the trans community from being protected from hate crimes in Scotland.