For the record: I don't understand why people are downvoting your comment, and I just upvoted it.
To whoever did the downvoting: please stop downvoting respectful discussion. Thank you.
> which is to lump together public shaming/pressure to fire/boycott based on e.g. sexual assault, with that based on an opinion
I do think that "an action" can be something much more inoccuous than "sexual assault". Think https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/502975-cal... which was clearly an "action", not an "opinion".
> I think that it can be legitimate to read an entire article and draw conclusions about the underlying message, motivation and mindset of the author.
Absolutely agreed, and that should inform the way you interpret the events described in the article. That said, I think it's important to keep in mind that even if the author is biased that doesn't immediately make everything they say false...
> - It states "fake evidence was manufactured" but doesn't actually cite any fake evidence.
That's interesting, because in my reading the text immediately following this sentence (about using menstruation as a metaphor, etc) was the specific description of the evidence that was found and that the author considers "fake". I'm not sure whether your disagree with the "fake" characterization or whether in your reading this was simply disconnected from the previous sentence.
> It eventually states, in as obscurantist a manner as possible, that Lindsay doesn't believe that trans women should be called women
Again, interesting. My reading of the article was that this was the "extreme reading" of the specific poem "The Imagined We", and the views imputed to Lindsay by her accusers, not a statement about her actual views.
I don't know whether you watched the linked video with the poem's recitation; it's annoyingly slow compared to reading, of course. But the poem doesn't directly say anything remotely like "trans women are not women"; it does talk about menstruation as something "we" (women) experience. Which is of course not true for all women, just like the other things mentioned in the poem are not necessarily experienced by all women.
I admit that I could be wrong here, but I did do some searching both when I originally read the article and just now and have not been able to find any evidence of Lindsay actually explicitly saying that she does not believe trans women should be called women. I'd welcome correction on this point if I'm wrong!
> Conservatives may hold all of the levers of power, dominate government, institutions, and the plutocratic class
Again, interesting. I would not say that conservatives dominate either "institutions" or "the plutocratic class", for what it's worth. Certainly not in terms of social attitudes.
> i.e. as if it were some serious social ill.
I do think that a climate of fear in which people are afraid to say anything other than enthusiastically parroting what is perceived as "the party line" because it will be misconstrued and twisted in ways that get them fired _would_ be a serious social ill.
I think there's a good argument to be had about whether we are currently experiencing such a climate; it seems to me that in some social/professional circles we are and in most we are not, at least so far. Depending on which of these circles one belongs to, the seriousness is therefore perceived very differently.
> Look up how much violence has been committed by people professing to be a part of antifa.
Yes, the whole antifa angle seems pretty clearly to be bunk and the police response seems like self-serving lies to me.
And going back to the original issue that set off this whole series of events, I don't have any good evidence for how much _actual_ anti-feminist violence is committed by "trans activists" or anyone associated with them. That is, whether the belief in "violent action" in the original "Skinny" article is actually something that leads to "violent action" in practice or whether it's basically people venting in ways that I happen to think are crude and inappropriate but are apparently acceptable in a number of communities. My prior is that there is not much, if any, actual violence going on here.
That said, I can understand someone opposing the idea of normalizing threats of violence of any sort, on the belief that once threatening of a particular kind of violence is normalized, people will in fact start acting on those threats.... There is some historical support for that belief.