It seems fair to compare Taiwan to Austria pre-1938, IMO. Not a perfect parallel for a variety of reasons, but a few obvious similarities exist.

Did something happen in her past that makes her so hateful on this issue

I can’t guess as to the full extent of her transphobia, but I can point to a couple of elements of it.

She did suffer domestic abuse of some sort before and around the time the first Harry Potter book came out. This was a cis man who did it, but I think in her mind there’s no difference between cis men and trans women.

There’s also a well-studied psychological phenomenon where people tend to double-down on their prior beliefs when challenged, unless those challenges come in a very narrow form. Her earliest transphobic comments may have been her being tepid about expressing her true beliefs, but they may genuinely have been the sort of misinformed casual transphobia that a much, much wider segment of the population has which may have gone no further if she were a normal person. But because lots of well-intentioned people—largely some of her most dedicated fans—tried to educate her and help her to be better, she may have doubled down and got into the reactionary feedback loop that so many transphobes, racists, and members of the alt-right got into. They perceive constructive criticism, especially when it comes in large volumes, as a personal attack, and the people who aren’t attacking them instead encourage them to double down on their beliefs, and reward them when they do.

Her books show a very strong liberal bias. Liberal in the sense that it’s not regressive per se, but it’s also strongly opposed to analysis of problems as stemming from systemic issues rather than One Bad Actor. SPEW is the easiest to point to, but the lack of systemic change in the governance of the Wizarding World post-Voldemort is more significant, in my view. The problem was one Minister of Magic who was just ignorant of the problem of Voldemort, followed by another who actively covered it up. These individuals are the bad guys who need to be defeated. It wasn’t, as the books tell it, underlying racism and classism of wizarding culture. So it seems that Rowling is not good at spotting systemic injustice. Such as the higher suicide rates among trans people (especially if they’re not accepted), higher rates of DV and other violence, and other problems faced are not factoring into her calculations. Which makes it so much easier to cast trans people as the bad guys.

But I find it hard for these to adequately explain either the initial spark of transphobia per se, or the rather extreme extent she’s gone to. So yeah, like you I’m a little curious if there’s more to it.

but basically just don’t count for any laws like “50% of company board members must be women to receive this tax break”.

Which, idk, seems reasonable to me.

I have no idea how that’s reasonable. The point of such laws is to promote equality. And even if you choose to count trans women as a completely unique third category (which you shouldn’t…the word “women” in “trans women” is there for a reason), they are certainly a minority gender, so counting them for the purpose of pro-diversity incentives seems like a no-brainer.

Her public celebration of the result was absolutely grotesque

There should be no laws that depend on either gender or sex

Ideally, maybe. In a future perfect society. But let’s remember that the court case that triggered this was about whether trans women count as women for the purposes of meeting laws that require gender quotas. Quotas that most of us should support because of their importance in combatting existing gender inequalities.

Nah, that doesn’t apply in this case. The UK is a world leader in transphobia, acting not because the US does things, but because they’re entirely transphobic on their own.

So Fake London is now known for more than just stroads, then. It’s stroads and rapists.

Maybe, but it’s hardly news. I graduated highschool well over a decade ago, and the case study I mentioned was not exactly new when I was studying economics in school.

No, the EU has a habit of protectionism disguised as legitimate interest. I recall a case study from when I was in high school, where the EU set the safety limits on a certain contaminant in a product—peanuts, I think it was—way, way stricter than any evidentiary basis, because EU farms could meet the restriction, but African or South American farms could not.

It’s hardly comparable to anything Trump is doing, but it’s worth mentioning, since you did claim EU laws are all about affecting everyone equally.

doesn’t mean that it should be used without consideration for its generally accepted meaning

This is my point. You are deciding that your “accepted meaning” must be the “generally” accepted meaning. That’s prescriptivist. I understood what was meant, because my understanding of the word comfortably allows for this. And since dictionaries generally aim to describe real-world usage (usually listing “archaic” or “rare” where appropriate, which most dictionaries will do with alternative definitions of rape—see attached image), I feel pretty comfortable in asserting that your attempts to prescribe a more limited definition are wrong. Especially given this was seemingly an attempted execution—in a country with rule of law, it would very likely be tried as attempted murder.

To be clear: at no point did I make any reference to rape or the definition thereof. I was only referring to how you and others were using lynch.

We all know the connotations of these terms

Do we? Because I didn’t have any issue with the word as used. To me, a lynching is a violent, usually race/ethnicity-based mob attack on a person. And this pretty well fits the bill.

You’re the one doing linguistic prescriptivism here. The only difference is that what you’re prescribing isn’t what’s in the dictionary, it’s what’s in your own head.

Except that in the context “lynched” is being used in this case, even with a strict “death only” definition, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that “attempted lynching” would have been appropriate. Given that context, and the fact that actually “death only” is not the definition of lynched, can you not see how crying about definitions looks an awful lot like downplaying the severity of this crime? Like when zionists cry about being accused of genocide?

Apple’s USB C is a bad example. They were probably a year or two away from doing that anyway. iPads already used it. Even Macs already used it.

A better example would be the more recent thing with Apple allowing apps from outside their App Store. Although they’re really dragging their feet with that one—allowing them, but only with prior approval, and oh we swear this app didn’t get approval for security reasons, not because we don’t want competition. Pinky promise!

The term repatriation is not in any way exclusive to POWs. It was, for example, used extensively during COVID when talking about voluntary repatriation of expats to their home countries.

In summary, the scientific literature strongly argues against the switching between DST and Standard Time and even more so against adopting DST permanently.

But that’s just my own opinion

Your opinion has as much relevance here as the opinion of climate change deniers.

Bruh, I just presented it because it was cool. You’re the one getting hung up on whether the fairly basic premise of the chart is the best premise that could have been used.

But yes, that DST is bad is a hill I was absolutely die on. That shit is terrible, and I have zero patience for people who defend it once the reason for objecting to it is explained to them.

Oh dang! They’re still on 0.18‽ Holys hit that’s old! Is the head admin/whoever’s responsible for deploying updates absent?

This one here should be pretty high res. I only scaled it down to 4000 px wide. If you’re not seeing that, it may be something funky with your instance’s proxy—check my instance.

But the original was 9600 wide iirc. If you want that, it cake from signing up to a mailing list that was linked by someone else in my earlier post in this community.