Suzanne Moore quits The Guardian [split topic]

[Sebastian Cobb]

When you look at the narrative surrounding women being silenced, and the fact several Potter cast members effectively saying "fuck off with that shit", and the papers including the Guardian spinning it as "women being silenced" agreeing with Rowling, it's true there's silencing going on, but it ain't the ones shouting about it.

[idunnosomename]

if you're being bullied by 338 people in your office it safe to say it's probably because you're an insufferable cunt.

in most cases the bullying was probably a sub saying "Hi Suzanne, could you stop putting a space before punctuation? You are 62 years old."

[Pingers]

I'm really enjoying the intersectionalists at the Guardian grappling with trans rights. *Calculators out* "Right, let's try and work out once and for all who is right on this. How many oppression points has she got again? Shit, or is it 'he'?"

[Ferris]

You know you are on the wrong side when you have to stretch the truth of the offences committed against you to make yourself seem reasonable.

It's a tacit acknowledgment that the facts as they are make you look bonkers (you left because of a letter supportive of trans rights that didn't mention you at all?), so you have to manipulate the message to get the shitmunchers on board ("I was literally bullied by 338 people all at once! In an office! And the guardian let it happen!")

[Famous Mortimer]

I'd lay good odds on 200 of those 338 having never met her and having no interaction with her outside of "please stop being a transphobe", so I'm not sure that counts as bullying.

[jobotic]

Apparently you get a quid a word at Unherd.


She got paid more than I do in three months for that. I need to get transphobing.

[king_tubby]

The letter wasn't specifically about her anyway.

Also more people signed than voted for her when she stood against Diane Abbot in the 2010 GE.

[GoblinAhFuckScary]

[idunnosomename]

https://twitter.com/VictoriaPeckham/status/1331606970252599298?s=19

Guess who won the Orwell prize this year.

It's like something out of one of those books!!! By Orwell!!!

[kngen]

So the gist of that long rambling load of old shite (I love that she complains about being edited in a piece that proves without doubt that she desperately needs an editor) is that she thinks she should be allowed to say what she wants, but no one else can say what they want in reply.

What is it about columnists (who, really, were employed to be trolls before that was even a word) and this belief that discourse is a one-way street?

When I worked in Scotland, we had Muriel Gray as a columnist (and a pretty bad one at that). At one point she actually threatened to quit if we kept publishing letters criticising her ludicrous, myopic observations e.g. No-one (that, is Muriel Gray) really cares about the smoking ban, because nobody (Muriel again) goes to pubs anymore, apart from pensioners. In Scotland!

Makes me wonder if this is why right-wing trolls like Clarkson and Littlejohn are more effective. They'll say any old shite for money, consequences be damned. But anyone with a conscience (however misplaced) feels the need to flounce at the slightest bit of pushback.

[dead-ced-dead]

This thread by Juno Dawson sums things up nicely.

https://twitter.com/junodawson/status/1331594377853071360

[Jumblegraws]

Fucking sick of anyone who doesn't have a background in biological science trumping on about "biological reality". A hundred times a week for the past two years I've heard this refrain it feels like. As if any of these dumbfucks have made it a paragraph into an academic paper that actually investigates transgender issues from a strictly biological perspective.

[JaDanketies]

Don't ya know people have been fired, put in the stocks and forced to go through town whipping themselves for the 'crime' of merely saying "sex is real" or "biology is real"? Clearly all the rich and powerful people have decided that sex and biology are fake, and if you think people ought to use she and her to refer to trans women, then you also think that sex and biology are fake.

[GoblinAhFuckScary]

transgenderism

just fyi transgenderism isn't the word. it's outdated and only used now by the fash to paint us as ideologues instead of people

Don't ya know people have been fired, put in the stocks and forced to go through town whipping themselves for the 'crime' of merely saying "sex is real" or "biology is real"?

wish this were true

[Jumblegraws]

just fyi transgenderism isn't the word. it's outdated and only used now by the fash to paint us as ideologues instead of people

Ah, apologies and noted.

[Kelvin]

just fyi transgenderism isn't the word. it's outdated and only used now by the fash to paint us as ideologues instead of people

I wouldn't use it because I thought it sounded a bit off, but what is the correct wording? Gender identity? I just say trans issues, trans people, trans issues in the hope I don't offend that way.

[idunnosomename]

It's a point noticed when they escape their UK reach on Twitter, that there is no class so pointlessly entitled as the egotistical commentariat of the British press.

[GoblinAhFuckScary]

Ah, apologies and noted.

No apologies!

I wouldn't use it because I thought it sounded a bit off, but what is the correct wording? Gender identity? I just say trans issues, trans people, trans issues in the hope I don't offend that way.

Yeah I guess those are all fine. Not at all applicable but in speech I always end up saying 'trans shit'

[Famous Mortimer]

It's a point noticed when they escape their UK reach on Twitter, that there is no class so pointlessly entitled as the egotistical commentariat of the British press.

What good have columnists like Moore ever achieved? Is the sum total of every column written by every useless one of them better for the world than...I don't know, one person helping an old person reach something off a high shelf in a supermarket?

[dead-ced-dead]

What good have columnists like Moore ever achieved? Is the sum total of every column written by every useless one of them better for the world than...I don't know, one person helping an old person reach something off a high shelf in a supermarket?

I do think that if someone is a great writer and pithy (both things Moore isn't)you can get some enjoyment from a columnist's work, if only it's a quick chuckle. But for the bile-spitting "I'm proud of being an utter cunt" style journals we've been seeing recently, it's hard not to conclude theat they serve no actual purpose in the world.

At least a critic or a journalist who focuses on a specific topic (sports journalist, political journalist etc) serves a purpose in that they know about their subject and their opinions could serve you in choosing a film to watch or help you understand the political landscape.

[Janie Jones]

if you're being bullied by 338 people in your office it safe to say it's probably because you're an insufferable cunt.

Actually it's not safe to say that. It might be true in the case that you're thinking about that the person being bullied is an insufferable cunt but being bullied is not an indicator of that fact. Was Prince Bantz's onetime workmate 'P*ki' an insufferable cunt? Was the only transgender person in my workplace who was routinely bullied by people who didn't even know her, an insufferable cunt?

[chveik]

sigh, you know he didn't mean that

[GoblinAhFuckScary]

[Zetetic]

Preston's power lay in silence. He had, after all, spent time in an iron lung.

I worry that I'm being oversensitive, but this actually seems quite a horrible thing to say about someone who watched his father die of polio and was then half-wrecked by the disease himself, even his opinions on women columnists were unpleasantly regressive if not misogynistic.

(It's not helped that it doesn't make much sense. You can talk when you're in an iron lung, can't you? It's just difficult because you're at the mercy of the machine's rhythm, so you'll probably get weird stridor etc. from unexpected changes from pulmonic egression to ingression etc. )

[Kelvin]

Extremely happy that Conker is relevant again  :)

[mippy]

Eh?

https://twitter.com/JohnCleese/status/1331206602431623170

[GoblinAhFuckScary]

Eh?

https://twitter.com/JohnCleese/status/1331206602431623170

john cleese is a disingenuous BITCH. said the other day he has no interest in this but here he is again. and ffs they always push this line about no one being able to answer their questions, with an inevitable abundance of clear and concise explanations which are always ignored, with the same disingenuous statements repeated the next hour by the op.

john cleese is a BITCH

[buttgammon]

john cleese is a disingenuous BITCH. said the other day he has no interest in this but here he is again. and ffs they always push this line about no one being able to answer their questions, with an inevitable abundance of clear and concise explanations which are always ignored, with the same disingenuous statements repeated the next hour by the op.

john cleese is a BITCH

What a twat. Is this their new cry now, that they're not interested, despite all the evidence to the contrary?

[pigamus]

It's because Eric Idle was an absolute cunt to Emma Dent Coad on Twitter and was then forced to apologise, I would guess.

[dead-ced-dead]

It's because Eric Idle was an absolute cunt to Emma Dent Coad on Twitter and was then forced to apologise, I would guess.

Are any of the Pythons not cunts, as far as we know? I know Gilliam's also a bit of a twat-spatula.