So drearily predictable you could replace him with an algorithm

Martin Robbins on the leaden predictability of Brendan O’Neill:

https://twitter.com/mjrobbins/status/885111164232978433

I found the two sources.

Martin in the New Statesman in 2013:

“Niggers put the ape in rape.” If an opinion columnist wrote that on the websites attached to their newspapers, we’d be facing questions in the Commons, earnest debates on Newsnight, and a lazy column about how “nigger” isn’t really a bad word after all scribbled on the back of a fag packet by one of the professional attention-seekers at Spiked!. This sentiment was posted on Twitter though, and nobody really cares because, well . . . Twitter.

Brendan O’Neill in Spiked two days ago:

Sharpen the pitchforks, fan the flames: a politician has misspoken.

Yes, another day, another Twitch-hunt. Another live-tweeted expulsion from polite society. Another roll-up-roll-up real-time destruction of a person’s reputation for the crime of having said something stupid.

The victim this time is Anne Marie Morris, the Tory MP for Newton Abbot. She was recorded dumbly using the outdated phrase ‘nigger in the woodpile’ at a gathering of Eurosceptic Tories at the East India Club in London. Ms Morris said ‘the real nigger in the woodpile’ in the Brexit issue is what happens if we get two years down the line and there’s still no deal between Britain and the EU. So she was clearly using the phrase in its classic sense to mean an issue of great importance that isn’t being openly or sufficiently discussed. She wasn’t being racist, just old-fashioned. Phew. We can call off the Twitterhounds, put back the tomatoes.

Its “classic” sense? What, that phrase originated with Aristophanes, or maybe it was Cicero on a bad day? So the phrase has a “classic” sense that is in no way contemptuously racist and demeaning? It’s just one of those hallowed British idioms from the golden past that haven’t got a mean bone in their body?

Whatever. At any rate there’s your lazy column about how “nigger” isn’t really a bad word after all scribbled on the back of a fag packet by the chief professional attention-seeker at Spiked!.

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