Tag: Brendan O’Neill

  • Self-conscious contrarianism throughout history

    John Elledge at the Staggers:

    Crack opinion-haver Brendan O’Neill reports throughout history

    WAR 2 July 1916

    Don’t listen to the virtue-signallers and their lazy contempt for the noble Tommy

    It’s just a bit of mud – why the hysteria over the Somme, asks Field Marshal O’Neill.

    384 comments

    …

    CONQUEST 17 October 1066

    The revealing hysteria over the Norman Invasion

    Anglo-Saxon elites finally reveal how much they despise ordinary people.

    2,316 comments

    FEAR 10 October 1940

    Keep calm and carry on? No thanks

    Brendan O’Neill makes the case for abject panic in the face of German onslaught.

    121 cmments

    And more.

    Feel free to add your own.

    Updating to add:

  • Spotting the REAL misogyny

    Brendan being Brendan, again.

    If you want to see misogyny – real, visceral, woman-shaming misogyny, the kind that views women as incapable of thinking for themselves, or as possessors of such foul thoughts that they shouldn’t think for themselves – look no further than #MeToo.

    Oh yes, that’s the one: Mr Predictable Paradox. The real misogynists are feminists! The real misogyny is a campaign to expose and end systemic sexual harassment! Gaze on the contrarian and be stunned.

    His Cause of Paradox this time is a social media wave of anger at Katie Roiphe over a forthcoming article in Harper’s that was said to name the woman who created the Shitty Media Men list. I took a brief look yesterday but stayed away because the article hasn’t been published yet, it wasn’t even clear that it had been written yet, I know nothing of the Shitty Media Men list and have doubts about it, and it was one more of those Twitter dogpiles which are always something to be cautious of. In short I probably mostly agree with Brendan that the Twitter fuss was at least misdirected, but where I don’t agree with him a bit is that this equals a golden opportunity to crap all over feminism yet again.

    Roiphe was branded an ‘Uncle Tom’ of gender, ‘trash’, a ‘bitch’ of course, a ‘demon’, and a ‘danger’ to good feminists who simply want to keep criminalising men without the benefit of such archaic things as due process or legal investigation.

    What does he mean “a ‘bitch’ of course”? Most feminists hate the word “bitch,” not least because it’s generally used to demonize exactly the qualities that make women feminist.

    But even uglier than the fact-lite nature of the anti-Roiphe fanaticism has been its misogyny, its weirdly feminist-cum-anti-women outlook. Roiphe, you see – like any other woman who criticises the new victim feminism – suffers from ‘internalised misogyny’. This deeply patronising idea holds that women do not really know their own minds and are easy prey to the allegedly misogynistic culture that surrounds them. It is feared that their dainty brains will be made self-hating through too much exposure to ‘the culture’, just as Victorian men worried that Victorian women would faint or die upon reading an outrageous letter or hearing a labourer say ‘fuck’. The same was said of women who voted for Trump, whom one feminist columnist likened to ‘slaves fluffing the pillows of their master’s rocking chair’. That is one of the most misogynistic things I’ve read in the mainstream press in years.

    Oh please. Feminism doesn’t mean thinking all women are perfect and must never be challenged. That logic applies across the board. Anti-racism activists can and do and must disagree with people even as they campaign for their rights; so can and do and must LGB activists and secularists and union organizers and the list goes on. Brendan knows this perfectly well, he’s just riling us up for the fun of it, like another Milo Yiannopoulos.

    We are now starting to see that #MeToo is not a pro-woman movement at all. It is a highly politicised campaign driven by, and benefiting, well-connected women in culture and the media, who must maintain their alleged victim status at all costs because it is leverage for them in terms both of their career and their moral authority in public discussion. This is why they respond with such unforgiving, misogynistic fury to any woman who questions them – because these women, these upstarts, these difficult creatures, threaten to unravel the victim politics that is so beneficial to a narrow but influential strata of society today. And so these women must be silenced, cast out, written off as ‘damaged’ and not worth listening to; let’s just be grateful that the asylums such free-thinking women would once have been dumped in no longer exist.

    Maybe he’ll be the next editor of Breitbart.

    Also: it’s stratum, not strata. One stratum, several strata.

  • There’s no doubt the laundries were unpleasant

    Speaking of Brendan O’Neill, a friend pointed out to me that he’d done a piece belittling the horrors of the Magdalene laundries in Ireland. It’s a disgusting read.

    The Australian, 22 February 2013

    THIS week, Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny apologised to women who had been institutionalised in Magdalene laundries. He described these Catholic, nun-run institutions, in which 10,000 girls and women did unpaid labour between 1922 and 1996, as “a dark part of our history”.

    There’s no doubt the laundries were unpleasant, filled with “fallen women” or petty criminals, who were made to wash sheets and do other laborious tasks for local businesses. But – and here’s the rub – it seems the laundries were not quite as unpleasant as we’d been led to believe.

    “Unpleasant” – easy for him to say, since he was never locked up in one and never at risk of being locked up in one.

    The Irish government’s report into the laundries, which prompted Kenny’s apology, discovered a disconnect between the public perception of the laundries and the lived reality in them.

    Ah yes, and similarly, Donald Trump keeps discovering a disconnect between news reports of his administration and his lived reality of them. I wonder why that might be.

    Many people’s view of the laundries was cemented by the 2002 movie The Magdalene Sisters, where nuns were shown shaving girls’ heads, forcing them to strip and perving over them in the showers, among other horrors.

    But the government report found not one case of sexual abuse by a nun in a Magdalene laundry.

    One, the government report was the government report – it had an interest. Two – yes, and? Is that the standard? The nuns didn’t sexually abuse their captives?

    It also found that in most cases where girls were beaten, it was in the same way as was commonplace in schools across Europe in the 1950s and 60s: they were rapped on the knuckles or caned on the legs.

    Oh that’s fine then. Let’s all go back to sleep.

    The “girls” shouldn’t have been there in the first place. Having sex isn’t a crime, and it’s likely that not all of them even had that sex voluntarily. Women shouldn’t be imprisoned for having sex and so they shouldn’t be physically abused while wrongfully imprisoned. We don’t need smug men dismissing the whole thing later because they’re callous sneering toads.

    Where once there was much talk of the Magdalene girls being slaves, the report found 35 per cent of women stayed in the laundries for less than three months and 60 per cent stayed less than a year. Many entered voluntarily.

    So 40 percent stayed more than a year and many did not enter voluntarily. Also how “voluntarily” was it really? How many women entered “voluntarily” because their families were making their lives hell, because they didn’t have the money to go elsewhere and couldn’t get work because they were pregnant, because neighbors were tormenting them?

    This was priest-ridden Ireland, which treated girls and women as well as you would expect a priest-ridden country to. It was bad: it was repressive and punitive and theocratic, and the laundries were part of the infrastructure of all that. Saying it wasn’t that bad for pregnant women to have to do hard labor in a laundry that raked in profits for the church is just smug and callous.

  • What we are meant to do

    Brendan O’Neill announces that we must never believe accusations of sexual assault unless and until they’re established in court.

    Why does everyone believe Kevin Spacey’s accuser rather than Kevin Spacey himself? In a civilised society, it would be the other way round. In a civilised society we would doubt the accuser and maintain the innocence of the accused.

    Is that so? Why? How? According to whom? Who is “we”?

    In short, it’s not that simple, is it. What about Harvey Weinstein for instance? It turns out that all Hollywood knew about Harvey Weinstein, and a lot of women told similar stories about their experiences with Harvey Weinstein, so why in a civilized society would we be maintaining Weinstein’s innocence while calling his victims liars? What’s civilized about that?

    There’s nothing civilized about it, but it’s nicer for the bros, and Brendan O’Neill is a bro.

    How do we know Spacey did this thing? Because one person said he did. If we had any kind of attachment to the ideals of reason and justice, the building blocks of civilisation, this wouldn’t be enough. It would be so far from being enough.

    Is that right? Is it that simple?

    Of course it’s not. It depends. Justice isn’t all one way – it isn’t all for Spacey and none for the one person who said. Often one person saying is all there is, and often that means the powerful get away with doing harm to the less powerful. That’s not exactly justice.

    Spacey says he doesn’t remember the assault. ‘I honestly do not remember the encounter’, he said in a statement, before going on to say that if it did happen, then he’s sorry. (Who’s advising these people? Do not apologise for something you do not remember doing.) Spacey, in his own lame way, is calling into question the veracity of Rapp’s accusation. And you know what? We should all be doing that. For three reasons.

    No we should not all be doing that. It’s fair to say that one person saying is just one person saying; that’s not the same as calling into question the person’s accusation.

    O’Neill says we should because 1. it was 30 years ago, 2. it’s part of #metoo. And 3 –

    And thirdly because this is what we are meant to do. We are meant to believe in the innocence of everyone accused of a crime or misdemeanour, until such a time as a jury of their peers has been convinced beyond reasonable doubt that this is ‘what he did’.

    Meant? Meant by whom? According to what rule? What a fatuous claim for such a showy libertarian to make. It’s also complete bullshit. The state is forbidden to assume guilt before it’s demonstrated, but that doesn’t mean every human on earth is required to “to believe in the innocence of everyone accused of a crime” until a jury [or a judge, he neglects to say] determines.

    O’Neill’s sloppiness is reliably annoying.

    Updating to add: I missed the last three paragraphs because I thought an ad break was the end of the piece.

    ‘I believe’ has become the ultimate virtue-signal. But it is utterly lacking in virtue to say this. Sixty-two years ago a woman called Carolyn Bryant Donham accused a young man of sexual harassment. He grabbed her by the wrist and said ‘How about it baby?’, she said. He wolf-whistled at her, she claimed. Everyone in her local community believed her, uncritically, and instantly. ‘I believe.’ They went after her harasser, tied him to the back of a truck, and then beat him to death in a barn. His name was Emmet Till. He was a victim of uncritical belief in people who make accusations of sexual harassment. Crying ‘I believe’ in response to every accusation of a sexual crime isn’t progressive; it’s a species of savagery.

    Evil piece of shit.

    Yes, we know accusations of rape were a pretext for lynching. That’s why I said “it’s not that simple” and “it depends” rather than “we have to believe all accusations no matter what.” But Harvey Weinstein was and is in no way comparable to Emmett Till, and Kevin Spacey’s accuser is not comparable to the white population of Money, Mississippi in 1955. I’m a good deal more agnostic about Spacey than I am about Weinstein, because as O’Neill says there is only one accuser – but that does not mean I’m required to “maintain his innocence.”

  • Never apologize

    Brendan O’Neill, dismissive as ever.

    In Britain a journalist can now have his career destroyed on the basis of one accusation.

    So, a journalist is automatically a he? There are no journalists who are she? I could swear there are – I could swear I’ve read journalism by them.

    Just like in the GDR. Yes, just as the Stasi and its myriad snitches could dispatch from public life writers and reporters they didn’t like simply by accusing them of something, simply by pointing a bony finger at them and saying, ‘I saw that person do a bad thing’, so in Britain in 2017 journalists can be hounded out of their profession by allegation alone.

    Nothing hyperbolic there.

    Consider the cases of Sam Kriss and Rupert Myers. Don’t worry if you haven’t heard of them. Most of us who are too busy and too given to self-respect to spend our lives on Twitter hadn’t heard of them until this week, and what bliss that was. The former is apparently a Corbynista pseud who writes for Vice, the bible of Shoreditch shitheads, and the latter is reportedly political correspondent for GQ, which last published an interesting article when John, Paul, George and Ringo were still a thing. Well, that’s what they used to do. They don’t anymore. Mr Kriss has been dumped by Vice after someone wrote a Facebook post accusing him of being a creep. And Mr Myers has been let go by GQ because he’s married and yet letches after female journalists (allegedly).

    The “someone” who wrote the post about Sam Kriss is of course a woman, and she didn’t accuse Kriss of “being a creep” but of persistently refusing to take ‘no’ for an answer. Kriss admitted it and apologized (while also “providing context”), so it’s not true that Vice dumped him simply on the basis of a Facebook post.

    There are two extraordinary things about these cases. The first is the accusations themselves. All they really add up to is that these two men are tossers and losers who aren’t very good at dating. Mr Kriss is accused by an anonymous person of repeatedly kissing and fondling her when they were on a date. She didn’t like it, which means he should have stopped or she should have gone home earlier. That’s a bad night out with a weirdo who doesn’t know how to court, not sexual assault.

    He sounds like Trump with an enhanced vocabulary.

    But he also sounds like Classic Contemptuous Man belittling and dismissing the concerns of some stupid bitch of a woman. He sounds like John Kelly at the White House yesterday calling a Congresswoman “that woman” and “an empty barrel” but never by her name. He sounds like all hostile men ridiculing women who object to being grabbed and poked without consent.

    And the second extraordinary thing is what has happened on the back of these accusations. For saying ‘I want to fuck you’ to a woman and then trying to kiss her (allegedly), Mr Myers has lost his journalistic jobs and been turned into a pariah. One writer tweeted that he should be ‘blacklisted’ by the media. There. This is what we are dealing with. A swirling sexual McCarthyism, a now out-of-control instinct to crush alleged sexual deviants, or simply people who – shock, horror – ask other people if they want to have sex. And Mr Kriss has been brought down, too. He’s lost some writing gigs, but of course not enough. Some are calling on other publications – like the Guardian and Atlantic – to promise never to publish him again. Maybe we should tear his tongue out and be done with it. That’s what they used to do to evil people in the past they no longer wanted to hear from. Do you know a journalist who’s rude or rubbish on dates or sexually arrogant? Well, now you can destroy him with one accusation! With one tweet! You don’t even need any evidence. Do it. Bring him down. Kill his career. Murder his prospects. This is the toxic climate we now live in. It’s grotesque.

    Says the man, in complete indifference to the toxic climate women have lived in forever. What about the toxic climate Harvey Weinstein created for women in the movie industry? Well Brendan wouldn’t care about that, because he’s not stupid enough to go and be a woman.

    Let’s remember something very important. These men face mere accusation, not proof of wrongdoing. (The two muppets in question haven’t helped themselves one bit by issuing instant and craven apologies rather than saying, ‘I challenge the way my behaviour is being discussed’.)

    Yeah! Never apologize! Grab or demand a fuck from women whenever you feel like it, and never apologize if they talk about it in public! Women are all bitches anyway, and men who apologize for groping them without invitation are letting down other men everywhere.

  • 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!.

  • Shut up, Brendan

    Brendan O’Neill defends poor persecuted President Pussygrabber from the sneers of people who think he’s not a good human being.

    If you want to know why Trump won, just look at the response to his winning. The lofty contempt for ‘low information’ Americans. The barely concealed disgust for the rednecks and cretins of ‘flyover’ America who are apparently racist and misogynistic and homophobic. The haughty sneering at the vulgar, moneyed American political system and how it has allowed a wealthy candidate to poison the little people’s mushy, malleable minds. The suggestion that American women, more than 40 per cent of whom are thought to have voted for Trump, suffer from internalised misogyny: that is, they don’t know their own minds, the poor dears. The hysterical, borderline apocalyptic claims that the world is now infernally screwed because ‘our candidate’, the good, pure person, didn’t get in.

    …

    The respectable set’s allergy to Trump is fundamentally an allergy to the idea of democracy itself. To them, Trump’s rise confirms the folly of asking the ignorant, the everyday, the non-subscribers to the New York Times, to decide on important political matters. They’re explicit about this now. In the run-up to election day, big-name commentators wondered out loud if democracy is all it’s cracked up to be. Trump’s ascendancy showed we need better checks and balances on ‘the passions of the mob’, said Andrew Sullivan. We should ‘cool and restrain [these] temporary populist passions’, he said, and refuse to allow ‘feeling, emotion’ to override ‘reasoned deliberation’. The little folks only feel and wail, you see, and it’s down to the grown-ups in the system to think coolly on their behalf.

    That all might make sense if President Pussygrabber were a factory worker turned union organizer, with a vulgar sense of humor and no fashion sense. But he’s not, is he. He’s the son of a rich owner of racially segregated apartment buildings, who inherited money and parlayed it into a lot more money. He’s extremely rich, and he exploits and cheats people who work for him – along with all the other bad stuff he does. He’s a very bad man. O’Neill is talking contemptible garbage.

    If this all sounds familiar, that’s because it’s the same kind of pleb-fearing horror that greeted the Brexit result four months ago. ‘Why elections are bad for democracy’, a headline in the Guardian said. The people are deluded and it is the task of those with ‘reason and expertise’ to ‘un-delude’ them, said a writer for Foreign Policy. ‘What if democracy doesn’t work? What if it never has and never will?’, wondered a pained George Monbiot. Boom. That’s it. The secret and not-so-secret cry of the elites and the experts and the observers over both Brexit and Trump is precisely that: ‘What if democracy doesn’t work?’

    Well direct democracy doesn’t work for complex subjects like membership in the EU. It needs people who are paid to take the time to understand it. It’s not “elitist” or sneering to think that government by referendum is a bad idea.

    This nasty, reactionary turn against democracy by so many of the well-educated both explains the victory of Trump, which neatly doubles up as a slap in the face of the establishment, and confirms why democracy is more important today than it has ever been. Because it really would be folly, madness in fact, to let an elite that so little understands ordinary people, and in fact loathes them, to run society unilaterally. Now that would be dangerous, more dangerous than Trump.

    Easy for him to say. He doesn’t live here.

  • It won’t work, Brendan

    For a minute there Brendan O’Neill almost deviates into sense.

    The alt-right, those anti-PC, bedroom-bound fans of Trump and strangers to sexual intercourse, have finally lost the plot. Consider their hounding of Leslie Jones. Jones is a very funny African-American comedian and the only good thing in the otherwise flat, weird and mirth-free Ghostbusters reboot. Yet for the past 48 hours she has been subjected to vile racist abuse by alt-right tweeters and gamers and other assorted saddos for her part in what they view as the feministic crime of remaking Ghostbusters with a female cast. She has left Twitter. This might mark the moment when the alt-right went full racist, full berserk, full unhinged.

    Ordinarily O’Neill doesn’t acknowledge that there is such a thing as vile racist abuse. He acknowledges speech, and dissent, and disagreement, but not vile racist abuse. His rhetoric is usually framed around the assumption that speech cannot be abuse, because it’s speech, and it’s free. It’s surprising to see him admitting so much here.

    The alt-right angries, convinced the world is one big lefty, feminist plot to ruin your average white dude’s life, have been fuming about the new Ghostbusters for months…They reserved most of their venom for Ms Jones because… well, because she’s black, and it’s hilarious and super un-PC to abuse a black woman, right?

    Well, yes, and ordinarily O’Neill borders on agreeing with them, or at least he avoids condemning them by pretending abuse is just dissent.

    The comments made about Ms Jones have been genuinely nauseating. She has been called the N-word. She has been sent photographs of apes. It’s like something from the 19th century. No one who believes in racial equality and basic human decency could fail to be moved by her pained tweet following two days of relentless racial slurs: ‘I feel like I’m in personal hell. I didn’t do anything to deserve this. It’s just too much. It shouldn’t be like this. So hurt right now.’ For any black person to be subjected to racist abuse is horrific; for it to happen to a woman whose only ‘crime’ was to land a breakthrough role in a female-oriented summer blockbuster is particularly despicable. Ms Jones hits the big time and is instantly bombarded with racist smears — awful.

    Quite so. It’s too bad it’s taken him so very long to admit that. It’s too bad he refused to admit it when it was aimed at women without the racist component. It’s too bad it’s taken something as extreme as the abuse aimed at Jones to get him to stop saying it’s just dissent.

    After that he gets incoherent.

    These attacks on Ms Jones speak to something more than the raucousness of Twitter, which can often be a good thing, certainly to the extent that it allows unheard, eccentric and potty voices to be heard. It speaks, more importantly, to the derailment of the important task of challenging PC. Tragically, for those of us who want to prick PC from a genuinely liberal and pro-autonomy perspective, the anti-PC mantle has in recent months been co-opted by the new right, or the alt-right, as some call them. These lovers of Trump (they call him ‘daddy’) and conspiracy theorists about feminism (whose wicked influence they spy everywhere) have turned being anti-PC from a decent, progressive position into an infantile, pathological, Tourette’s-style desire to scream offensive words out loud, like the seven-year-old who’s just discovered the thrill that comes with saying ‘f**k’.

    Except that that’s what it’s always been. This isn’t something that has changed “in recent months”; Twitter has been like this for years. Maybe there were a few months at the beginning of Twitter’s existence when it wasn’t like that, I don’t know, but it’s certainly been like that since at least 2011, and probably longer.

    And that business about “pricking PC” from a decent, progressive position is bullshit. That ship sailed not years but decades ago.

    Their response to new and mad PC rules on how to talk about race and gender is not to criticise them dispassionately, or point out that it’s ironically pretty racist and sexist to suggest black people and women need protection from offensive words; no, it’s to say the offensive words, to say the N-word, as loudly as possible, and ideally to a black person.

    Talk about wanting to have it both ways. Look, Brendan, either saying “the N-word” and “the C-word” to black people and women is a bad thing to do, or it isn’t. Either people shouldn’t abuse black people and women by calling them racist and sexist names, or they should. It’s no good saying they shouldn’t but at the same time “it’s ironically pretty racist and sexist to suggest black people and women need protection from offensive words.” No, it really is not “pretty racist and sexist” to say that people should not abuse black people and women by calling them racist and sexist names. That’s not “suggesting they need protection from offensive words” – it’s saying racist and sexist abuse is racist and sexist abuse.

    At this point it would probably kill Brendan to drop that stupid, tired, smug line – but if he thinks he can combine it with outrage at the way “the alt-right” abused Leslie Jones, he’s delusional.

  • Brendan wants his women brainy, radical and beach-ready

    Brendan is coat-trailing again. I’m taking the bait again. I’m too literal-minded not to.

    Feminism, sadly, becomes more like Islamism every day.

    Uh huh, and as Nate Phelps once told me, I’m like Fred Phelps.

    What’s his argument? Islamists are puritanical about women’s bodies, and so are feminists.

    Here’s a tip for political activists: if your rabble-rousing echoes the behaviour and ideas of Islamists, then you’re doing something wrong. Consider the Protein World advert which — clutch my pearls! — features a photo of a beautiful, svelte woman in a bikini next to the question: ‘Are you beach body ready?’ Angry women, and probably some men, have been writing outraged slogans on these posters, scribbling on the poor model’s face and body, seemingly blissfully unaware that they’re following in the footsteps of intolerant Islamic agitators.

    Or, you know, not unaware at all, but thinking that since their reasons are different, they’re not actually following in those footsteps. Islamists eat and sleep and excrete; so do feminists; news at eleven.

    Feminism, sadly, becomes more like Islamism every day. Alongside the ad-defacing antics, there’s also the campaign to put saucy tabloids and lads’ mags in black bags, echoing an ugly sight I beheld in Dubai once: Western magazines whose covers had been defaced with black gaffer tape by religious censors determined to hide women’s cleavage from the masses. And there was the war against Page 3 (RIP): a boob-hiding project that Muslim Patrol would be proud of. Too much modern feminism depicts women as fragile, as unable to cope with rude pictures or rough words, as requiring protection from the banter and imagery of everyday life. In the words of the anti-Page 3 campaign, such stuff can have a ‘negative impact’ on women’s ‘self-esteem’. It’s so alarmingly patronising, and it really does bring to mind the cloying over-protectionism of Islamists, who likewise see women as dainty, easily damaged, in need of constant chaperoning when they venture into the jungle of public life.

    Can’t we try to resuscitate the spirit of the old sexually liberated feminism, when the likes of Germaine Greer didn’t want to ban photos of bikinis but instead posed for them? Look at Germaine: brainy, radical and beach-ready.

    Can’t women go on being consumer goods for smug men like Brendan?

     

  • On the other hand

    In contrast, there’s the predictably and reliably flippant opinion (or pretend-opinion) of the always flippant and callous Brendan O’Neill.

    I know we’re all supposed to be spitting blood over Katie Hopkins’ Sun column about African migrants. In fact, anyone who isn’t currently testing the durability of their computer keyboard by bashing out Hopkins-mauling tweets risks having their moral decency called into question.

    There you go – predictable and callous. The important thing is to register disdain for people who object to a high-circulation newspaper’s publication of a piece calling African migrants cockroaches. Nicely done, Brendan; your priorities are an inspiration to us all.

    And yet, I find myself far more infuriated by the Hopkins haters, especially those who want her sacked, than by Hopkins herself.

    Well then your thinking is fucked. However annoying self-righteous people can be, it’s fucked thinking to get more infuriated by them than by unabashed racism crossed with xenophobia.

    But the ideas she expressed, and the language she used, are rare — that’s why we found them so shocking. In contrast, the response of her detractors, their demand that Something Must Be Done — the ‘something’ ideally being Hopkins’ sacking — are all too common in this censorious century. Hopkins gave vent to a thankfully now rare form of intolerance. Her haters are expressing a more mainstream, and thus more dangerous, form of intolerance: intolerance of offensiveness, of extreme views, of anything that isn’t in tune with the political hymn sheet all good people are expected to warble from these days.

    That’s all I can stand to read. If you want more, it’s here.

  • Teach your children well

    I was asking if Brendan O’Neill and his clone-allies at the “Institute for Ideas” have become so enamored of their own contrarianism that they’re now actually promoting bullying…or at least I was asking if O’Neill has, and I at least thought about mentioning his clone-allies too. Anyway the answer is yes, they have. Here’s Claire Fox – one of the ally-clones – doing just that a few weeks ago:

    Schools should abandon their anti-bullying programmes because they make children more “thin-skinned” and less resilient, according to the head of a thinktank.

    Speaking in a debate on “character education” at the London Festival of Education today, Claire Fox, director of the Institute of Ideas, said schools should focus on teaching core academic subjects, rather than “grit”.

    “I think young people need to be more self-critical and less self aware,” she said.”They should stop worrying about themselves.

    “If you want to encourage grit in schools get rid of anti-bullying programmes. We are taking the grit out of kids and we could do with backing off.

    “We have a generation of cotton-wool kids afraid to take risks.”

    What a stupid, callous, reckless, irresponsible, brutal thing to say. “Get rid of anti-bullying programmes” – for children. Because bullying is so fabulously good for children, as any fule kno.

    udith Suissa, a reader in philosophy of education at the Institute of Education, said to suggest abandonig anti-bullying programmes was “ridiculous”.

    Earlier in the debate, she questioned why schools focus on building “grit and resilience” in pupils.

    “To me, the emphasis on grit and resilience is sending the message to teachers that their main role as educators is not to challenge society but to prepare children to compete in this sytem; not to get children to think about what’s wrong with society but to give children grit and resilience to cope with poverty. It’s deeply troubling.”

    Really. Never mind teaching children how to put up with bullying; get rid of bullying. Don’t teach people how to accept bullying, teach them that bullying is unacceptable. Don’t teach underlings how to keep quiet when the boss punches them in the face; fire the boss who punches underlings in the face. As Bertrand Russell’s grandmama liked to quote, do not follow a multitude to do evil.

    In December, education secretary Nicky Morgan said England was to become a “global leader” in teaching character, resilience and grit to students.

    Oh dear god. How very Tory.

  • Guest post: To keep the liberal-tweaking going

    Originally a comment by Morgan on Brendan O’Neill is broken-hearted over Clarkson.

    Just as you or I would be sacked if we walloped a co-worker, especially someone below us in the pecking order, so Clarkson deserves the boot too, says his army of haters in the media and on Twitter.
    Please. If this were a simple punishment-for-physicality issue, why has so much of the Clarkson-baiting commentary obsessed over what Clarkson thinks and says?

    Well..
    a) Because the only reason anyone’s arguing Clarkson shouldn’t be fired is because they like what he thinks and says, or enjoy that others don’t.
    b) Because “he should have been sacked long ago for being a vile shit, and his employers’ and fans’ reluctance to call him on his bad behaviour is the reason it reached the point where he assaulted a subordinate” is a very obvious yet worthwhile point to make.
    c) Even if those calling for his sacking have the most impure of motives, the point in the first paragraph quoted is still completely valid and sufficient.

    O’Neill is essentially arguing that Clarkson should have total immunity from any consequences for anything he does, because he annoys people O’Neill dislikes. It’s the BBC’s duty to feed him as many coworkers as he wants to assault, to keep the liberal-tweaking going, it seems.

  • Brendan O’Neill is broken-hearted over Clarkson

    Yet again Brendan O’Neill says something more disgusting than I would have thought possible. Yet again!!

    I’m gutted to hear that the BBC has given Clarkson the big heave-ho over his fracas with that producer who didn’t have his dinner ready on time.

    Why? Because it’s further evidence of the Beeb’s self-emasculation, its sheepish, apologetic jettisoning of anything that might rile right-thinking viewers or make Hampstead-dwelling licence fee-payers choke on their Ovaltine.

    What?????

    Clarkson punched his underling in the face. He split his lip. He assaulted him. In what universe does that have anything to do with “right-thinking” or Hampstead? Since when is it “politically correct” to have rules that bosses aren’t allowed to punch their underlings? What the hell is this, Henry 8’s court after nine straight hours of boozing? How is it in any way “sheepish” for the BBC to fire Clarkson for punching an employee? Is the BBC supposed to allow its stars to punch employees? How is this decision the BBC “emasculating” itself? Is that what “masculine” means to Brendan O’Neill – top people being allowed to punch their subordinates in the face with impunity?

    Notice also that he too calls it a “fracas.” What bullshit. Call it what it is, not something nicer because you approve of it.

    With the elbowing aside of JC, we are witnessing not simply the sacking of an employee over a scuffle, but the willingness of a scandal-stung, crisis-ridden BBC to ditch anything that has the whiff of controversy and to bend its knee to the bland, larks-free worldview of the right-on.

    “Controversy”? “Larks”? What is the matter with him? What will he write next – “Hooray for Bullying, Bullying is Fun”? And again, why is he making it about political correctness? Is it only liberals who think the workplace should not be a boxing ring?

    In the oceans of ink that have been spilt over Clarksongate, or Punchgate, or whatever gate this is, the least convincing commentary has been that which tries to convince us this is just a workplace disciplinary matter.

    Just as you or I would be sacked if we walloped a co-worker, especially someone below us in the pecking order, so Clarkson deserves the boot too, says his army of haters in the media and on Twitter.

    Please.

    Please, Telegraph, stop paying this loathsome man to write this shit.

    And now, cravenly, like a hostage reading from a script written by his captors, the BBC has capitulated and got rid of one of the jewels in its crown, the man who made it millions of pounds and won it millions of viewers around the world.

    What gobsmacking idiocy. The BBC had already, in recent years, offered up its cojones for a public kicking, becoming an increasingly wimpish, risk-dodging sorry excuse for a public broadcaster.

    He forgot to say the BBC is pussy-whipped. What are you if you offer up your cojones? Pussy-whipped, definitely.

    Well done, liberal elite. You’ve won. You’ve made the Beeb as bland as you are.

    I won’t miss Clarkson on Top Gear, because I didn’t watch him on it. But millions and millions of people, here and abroad, will miss him. And all of us, Clarkson fans or not, should be worried that the BBC has finally been completely colonised by the dead, dogmatic, fun-free outlook of a minuscule, if hugely influential, section of British society.

    It’s a bullies’ charter. He gets more loathsome every time I read him. Next week I suppose he’ll be giving advice on how to burn children with cigarettes when no one is looking.

  • A kernel

    For once, there’s a kernel of truth in something Brendan O’Neill writes (in the Telegraph this time). Only a kernel though.

    When did atheists become so teeth-gratingly annoying? Surely non-believers in God weren’t always the colossal pains in the collective backside that they are today? Surely there was a time when you could say to someone “I am an atheist” without them instantly assuming you were a smug, self-righteous loather of dumb hicks given to making pseudo-clever statements like, “Well, Leviticus also frowns upon having unkempt hair, did you know that?” Things are now so bad that I tend to keep my atheism to myself, and instead mumble something about being a very lapsed Catholic if I’m put on the spot, for fear that uttering the A-word will make people think I’m a Dawkins drone with a mammoth superiority complex and a hives-like allergy to nurses wearing crucifixes.

    You can see the kernel of truth there, I’m sure. You can see it because Dawkins has been doing a bang-up job lately of performing that very atheist in public, by which I mean, on Twitter. You can see it also because so many Dawkins drones (to use O’Neill’s label) have been doing the same ever since July 2011.

    These days, barely a week passes without the emergence of yet more evidence that atheists are the most irritating people on Earth. Last week we had the spectacle of Dawkins and his slavish Twitter followers (whose adherence to Dawkins’ diktats makes those Kool-Aid-drinking Jonestown folk seem level-headed in comparison) boring on about how stupid Muslims are.

    And this is why the kernel is only a kernel. Yes, last week we had that spectacle, but we also had the spectacle of many atheists saying that Twitter performance was shit. We had Alex Gabriel saying it. We had me saying it. We had a good few saying it.

    Atheists online are forever sharing memes about how stupid religious people are. I know this because some of my best Facebook friends are atheists. There’s even a website called Atheist Meme Base, whose most popular tags tell you everything you need to know about it and about the kind of people who borrow its memes to proselytise about godlessness to the ignorant: “indoctrination”, “Christians”, “funny”, “hell”, “misogyny”, “scumbag God”, “logic”. Atheists in the public sphere spend their every tragic waking hour doing little more than mocking the faithful. In the words of Robin Wright, they seem determined “to make it not just uncool to believe, but cool to ridicule believers”. To that end if you ever have the misfortune, as I once did, to step foot into an atheistic get-together, which are now common occurrences in the Western world, patronised by people afflicted with repetitive strain injury from so furiously patting themselves on the back for being clever, you will witness unprecedented levels of intellectual smugness and hostility towards hoi polloi.

    Sometimes that’s true. There’s the kernel again. But it’s not always true, and then…when there is a protected, deferential, entrenched culture-wide view that religious beliefs must not be treated as in any way intellectually dubious, then there’s a need for a certain amount of frank, blunt, even tactless confrontation.

    But…a certain amount is not an infinite amount, and the frank blunt tactless confrontation can get stale, and when it’s personal it can get worse than stale.

    The anti-feminist mostly-misogynist harassers among the atheists have perhaps made it easier for me to see this. (Or, from their point of view, have caused me to adopt this particular bias.) Their ugly combination of malice and persistence has put me off things like endless rude tweets about religion, even if I agree with the substance. (But then how much substance can there be in a tweet? That’s part of the problem. Tweets are for slogans, not substance.)

    So, what’s gone wrong with atheism? The problem isn’t atheism itself, of course, which is just non-belief, a nothing, a lack of something. Rather it is the transformation of this nothing into an identity, into the basis of one’s outlook on life, which gives rise to today’s monumentally annoying atheism. The problem with today’s campaigning atheists is that they have turned their absence of belief in God into the be-all and end-all of their personality. Which is bizarre. Atheism merely signals what you don’t believe in, not what you do believe in. It’s a negative. And therefore, basing your entire worldview on it is bound to generate immense amounts of negativity. Where earlier generations of the Godless viewed their atheism as a pretty minor part of their personality, or at most as the starting point of their broader identity as socialists or humanists or whatever, today’s ostentatiously Godless folk constantly declare “I am an atheist!” as if that tells you everything you need to know about a person, when it doesn’t.

    There’s a good deal to that. Two kernels maybe, instead of one. Or, less grudgingly, he’s right. That is after all what we’ve been arguing for the past year or more – we who have. We want more than atheism. Atheism, hell yes, but also more than that.

    It’s odd to find myself agreeing with O’Neill – but he did less coat-trailing than usual in this piece. Or am I imagining it?

  • There was a contrarian journalist

    Daphna Shezaf went to QED last weekend and wrote a blog post about it Thursday. Specifically she wrote about the panel that featured Brendan O’Neill doing his usual shtick and getting annoyed when it didn’t go down well. Shezaf made a substantive point about the subject, but in my frivolous way I’m going to focus on the O’Neill aspect, because after all he’s there.

    There was the “is science the new religion” debate, which turned out to be about science and politics. It was really the only panel with someone from “the outside”, journalist Brendan O’Neill. He debated with physicists Jeff Forshaw and Helen Czerski, and comedian Robin Ince. As Vicky puts it, “it quite quickly deteriorated into an exasperated and highly entertaining bun-fight between” O’Neill and Ince. Ince blogged about the exchange, O’Neill published his “speech” and allegedly said that “QEDcon was like a crazy cult”.

    So, there was a contrarian journalist, whose politics in almost any question are reversed to that of almost any other person in the room. It was a good show. O’Neill was the ultimate bad guy, Ince was fantastically enraged. The QED crowd got to be called consensus zealots on Twitter, which is utterly satisfying.

    The reason I saw Shezaf’s post is because I first saw this tweet:

    Hayes

    Patrick Hayes

    Brendan O’Neill is “the ultimate bad guy”: http://tiny.cc/t7lsvw . Confirms O’Neill’s claim he was #QEDcon‘s Emmanuel Goldstein

     Here’s what’s both funny and infuriating about that: Brendan O’Neill wants to be everything’s Emmanuel Goldstein; it’s what he does. If it weren’t and he didn’t he wouldn’t keep going out of his way to do it. If he didn’t want to get up everyone’s nose he wouldn’t write such awful shite.

    And Patrick Hayes also writes for Spiked so he knows that perfectly well.

    They’re such frauds, those guys, posturing for all they’re worth and then pretending to be wounded when people get exasperated with their posturing.

  • Perverted chattering degenerate misanthropes hunt for witches

    It’s Brendan! Again! Yes he’s back, that mischief-loving scamp from Living Libertarian Marxism or do I mean Zombie Catholic Theocracy. What is it this time? It’s that the reporting and commentary on Jimmy Savile is – wait for it – a witch-hunt.

    Wut? The guy’s dead. How can it be a witch hunt when he’s dead?

    With each passing day – hour, in fact – the Jimmy Savile scandal looks more and more like a modern-day version of the hysteria that gripped seventeenth-century Salem, when a small town in Massachusetts became convinced that it had witches in its midst. Since the first accusations of child abuse were made against the late BBC entertainer in an ITV documentary on 3 October, Britain’s chattering classes have become consumed by a witch-hunting mentality, with almost every respectable institution, from the BBC to the NHS to the child-protection industry, finding itself dragged into a vortex of Savile-related suspicion and rumour, accusation and counteraccusation.

    But he’s dead. He’s gone. People in Salem became convinced that it had witches in its midst: living witches, currently active witches, witches that could get you at any moment. Not people who were already gone.

    We also have hysterical, mob-like attacks on the alleged witches, as in Salem. Being dead, Savile can’t be dragged into a showtrial and hanged, as the witches of Salem were, but he can be subjected to a posthumous trial by media, in which every claim made about him is instantly taken as good coin.

    At least he admits the logistical problem with his being dead, but only to sweep it away. I don’t know how careful and accurate the coverage is, but Brendan doesn’t really seem to be interested in that – he’s clearly much more interested in his usual ”I’m not like them” pose and in hyperbolic castigation.

    And in the most striking echo of Salem, the initial fingerpointing at Savile has descended into fingerpointing at others; at everyone; at those who knew about his abuse but said nothing, and those who didn’t know about it but should have; against the ‘complicit’, the ‘silent’, the ‘enablers’, the ‘accomplices’.

    And? What about it? There are such people in the world; what’s with the scare-quotes?

    The Savile story is really a vessel for the cultural elite’s perverted obsession with child abuse, and more importantly its belief that everyone is at it – that in every institution, ‘town, village and hamlet’, there are perverts and innocence despoilers, casually warping the next generation. In modern Britain, the figure of The Paedophile has become the means through which the misanthropes who rule over us express their profound fear and suspicion of adults in general, and also of communities and institutions – even of the institutions they hold dear, such is the self-destructive dynamic triggered by the unleashing of the Salem ethos. If Savile had never existed, the chattering classes would have had to invent him, so perfect an encapsulation is he of their degenerate view of the whole of adult society today.

    Godalmighty. Is it funny or scary or both? It’s as if he’s describing himself, but somehow projecting it onto everyone else. One minute “the cultural elite” has a perverted obsession, but the next minute that elite is seeing perverts everywhere. Which is it?! Is it the elite that is perverted, or is it the elite that sees perverts under every rock? And who are these misanthropes who fear adults who rule over us? Who are these chattering classes with their “degenerate view”? He sounds scarily like a Nazi there.

    It’s as if he’s a raving lunatic complaining about all these raving lunatics cluttering up the place.

  • Chopping children for god is not abuse ok

    Via Zinnia – more vicious shite from Brendan O’Neill.

    There are many bad things about the modern atheistic assault on religion. But perhaps the worst thing is its rebranding of certain religious practices as “child abuse”. Everything from sending your kid to a Catholic school to having your baby boy circumcised has been redefined by anti-religious campaigners as “abuse”.

    Yes imagine that! Some people are so depraved that they actually think it’s “abuse” to slice off part of an infant’s penis to please an imaginary god. How could that possibly be abuse?! 

    This use of emotionally loaded language to demonise the practices and beliefs of people of faith has reached its ugly and logical conclusion in Germany, where a court has decreed that circumcision for religious purposes causes “bodily harm”, against boys who are “unable to give their consent”, and therefore should be outlawed.

    Because obviously slicing off part of the penis in no way causes “bodily harm”; and obviously infants are perfectly “able to give their consent”; and anyway causing bodily harm without consent is obviously not something that should be outlawed. Right?!

    No. It is bodily harm; it is without consent; it is far from obvious that it should not be outlawed.

    The labelling of religious practices as “child abuse” is the most cynical tactic in the armoury of today’s so-called New Atheists. They are effectively using children as human shields, as a cover under which they and their beloved state might interfere in both family life and the realm of religious conscience in order to reprimand people for believing the wrong things and carrying ou[t] “cruel” practices.

    “Cynical tactic” forsooth. I have a feeling I’ve been here before – marveling at the gall of Brendan O’Neill accusing anyone else of using a ”cynical tactic.” I don’t think the former Living Marxism guy believes a word of this bullshit, I think he just enjoys the sport.

    He’s chicken-shit, too; the comments are closed.

  • Vile Brendan O’Neill

    Vile smug sneery mind-reading Brendan O’Neill, who sees through everyone’s fake right-on poses and spots the self-flattery underneath – according to him, anyway.

    now it is positively fashionable, bang on trend, for everyone from top American politicians to Ivy League students to wear a hoodie to show that they “care for Trayvon”. Yet far from being an indication of deep moral sensitivity, all this hoodie-wearing looks to me like a modern, PC version of “blacking up”, with the respectable classes pulling on the garb of black America in order to send a message about their own inherent goodness.

    That’s what everything looks like to him. People who support same-sex marriage look to him like people doing something “in order to send a message about their own inherent goodness.” It’s as if he’d just had that first eye-opening class with Professor Iconoclast who explains to woolly undergraduates that what looks like public spirit or dedication is actually sadism or displaced masturbation or a chocolate-substitute.

    And here’s a news flash for Brendan and his idiotically complaisant editors: he doesn’t know that. He doesn’t know why people do what they do. Freud didn’t know, Nietzsche didn’t know, and he doesn’t know. He certainly doesn’t know why all the people who wear hoodies as a Trayvon-statement do so. Sure, maybe he’s right, maybe there’s an element of vanity in it for a lot of people; there usually is, with most things we do; so the fuck what? What about the element of vanity in Vile Brendan’s vile posts? We don’t think he does those out of sheer disinterested public spirit do we? Doesn’t he think he’s a devilish handsome fellow, looking up at us in that dashingly “you can’t fool me” way?

    And then read the comments under his vile post. That’s the kind of person who likes his stuff. Vile smug sneery mind-reading git.

    H/t Kevin Anthoney.

  • Part deux

    More on O’Neill. (Don’t ask ‘why.’ I’m interested in this kind of thing – the blithe indifference to facts, the perversity, the malice, the lack of responsibility, the should-know-better quality; the smugness, the preening, the bullying on behalf of the already powerful.)

    on 31 March, atheists in the US military had their first-ever get-together on a military base, under the banner ‘Rock Beyond Belief’. ‘All of us want to come out of the closet and demand equality’, said one sergeant, no doubt pissing off gay military servicemen who, not unreasonably, probably think that such phrases are best used by them rather than by their godless colleagues.

    Note that “no doubt.” Note the “probably.” He doesn’t in the least know that gay military women and men think that such phrases are best used by them rather than by their godless colleagues. (Not to mention the fact that he doesn’t know they can’t be both. He doesn’t know that all gay military women and men are theists. Gay people in general have good reasons to be wary of theism.) He doesn’t know that, and he gives no reason to think so. That could be because it’s so hard to think of one.

    O’Neill’s point seems to be that atheists are not in fact closeted – which if you know anything at all about how atheists are viewed in the US is completely ludicrous. Of course there are closeted atheists! Lots of them, all over the country.

    Let’s pretend for a second that you’re O’Neill, and you need this explained to you. It’s like this, O’Neill: atheism is hated in many parts of the US, and so are atheists. In many places atheists don’t know if there are any other atheists in their school or workplace or town, and they feel isolated and weird and afraid.

    Think about that simple little statement of facts. What do you suppose the upshot is? It’s that many atheists don’t tell anyone they are atheists. Others tell a trusted few but no one else. That is what it is to be closeted.

    So why would gay soldiers be pissed off because atheists talk about being closeted? Why would they think the word is for them and not for anyone else?

    We can stop pretending that you’re O’Neill now. I don’t know how he would answer my questions. I don’t think there is any reasonable answer.

    Then there’s this:

    although there is certainly cultural hostility towards atheists in parts of America, elsewhere, particularly in academia, publishing and throughout the political and media worlds of Western Europe, they enjoy untouchable ‘darling’ status these days, being fawned over like never before.

    One, untouchable ‘darling’ status? Are you kidding?

    Did he miss the outburst of vituperation at Richard Dawkins in the wake of the Ipsos Mori poll, complete with the Telegraph’s shock-horror story about a distant ancestor of his owning slaves…two centuries ago? Has O’Neill missed the whole backlash? (That would be odd, given how much he’s contributed to it himself.)

    Two, even if that were true, what difference would it make to people in Creeping Jesus, Alabama? One might as well say that because there are some rich people named Jones, all people named Jones are rich.

    It is their creation of a movement based on negatives rather than positives which explains why the New Atheists are so screechy. Because bereft of anything substantial or ideological to cohere themselves around, they instead spend the whole time attacking their opposite number – those who do believe in what New Atheists do not: religious people, the thick, the unenlightened. Like electrons in an atom, the ‘negatives’ of the New Atheist clique are forever whizzing around the ‘positives’ of the God lobby. The hole at the heart of modern atheism was best summed up in what Time magazine last month described as ‘The Rise of the Nones’ – that is, the speedily growing group of Americans who now list their religious affiliation as ‘none’. That is fine, of course, but then to cultivate an entire identity, a whole life’s outlook, on the basis of that ‘none’? That is sad. Who wants to be a ‘none’? I’d rather be a nun. At least they still believe in something.

    Yes, they believe in something – they believe in a male god who founded a church run exclusively by men; they believe in their own subordination; they believe women should die rather than have an emergency abortion; they believe the Catholic church deserves their loyalty and subordination despite its lurid history of cruelty and brutality. What a strange thing for O’Neill to boast of.

  • How dare you rebel against the tyrant

    Brendan. At it again. Possibly more indifferent to the facts than ever.

    I know Easter is traditionally a time when Christians give praise for the rising again of Jesus after his flagellation and crucifixion by the Romans. But this year, in the midst of your Easter egg-eating and possible Mass-attending, try to spare a thought for the modern-day equivalent of whipped, weeping Jesuses – that is, the New Atheists, the non-believers, who would have us believe that it is they who face persecution in the twenty-first century. Playing what we might call the Crucifixion Card, the atheist lobby now argues that its members suffer the slings and arrows and jibes of the heartless hordes in a similar way that Christians did 2,000 years ago.

    Does it? Does “the atheist lobby” (is there such a thing?) claim “its members” (do lobbies have members?) suffer the way early Christians did? I don’t recall ever seeing such a claim. Do you know of any? Do fill us in if so. Meanwhile – I think O’Neill is just saying it, the way he just says so many things. Commentarial license, no doubt – but he abuses it. He abuses it in aid of making perverse claims that the more privileged are being bullies by the less privileged. What an ugly hobby.

    Perhaps keen to shake off the tag of ‘Darwin’s pitbulls’, atheist campaigners now play the role of put-upon pups. They’re all about the victimology. Over the past two weeks, there have been public gatherings of atheists in which they have, self-consciously and shamelessly, plundered from the language of old oppressed groups to try to describe their alleged plight.

    Bullshit. (And O’Neill should remind himself of the way bishops and cardinals have been shamelessly plundering the language of oppressed groups lately to complain about public reaction to the child-rape and failure-to-report problem among others.) Bullshit. We’re not “plundering” any language; there is abundant evidence that atheists are subject to the same kind of bigotry and marginalization for no sensible reason that “old oppressed groups” have been. Many of us also belong to those “old oppressed groups” so the language is already ours, and we know perfectly well that it fits.

    There are no legislative restrictions on atheists’ rights or apartheid systems that separate them from the God-fearing, which means their claims to be following in the footsteps of protesting blacks are not only unfounded, but also pretty depraved.

    That’s just flat-out false. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and he can’t be bothered to find out. There are legislative restrictions on atheists’ rights in the US, in individual states and localities. As for apartheid systems – he should watch a few videos from the recent Cranston school board meetings sometime. It’s not official apartheid, but it sure as hell is loud aggressive bullying of one slender teenager. It’s de facto apartheid.

    The central problem with the New Atheist movement is that it is based entirely on a lack of belief rather than on a belief. It is built on an absence, on a negative, on the fact that these people share a non-belief in God, rather than on any shared vision of the future.

    Wrong: we share a vision of the future without the secretive unaccountable bully who tells us what to do but won’t let us appeal the rulings. Would O’Neill make the same accusation against movements to get rid of Mugabe, or Kim, or any other tyrant? He might say getting rid of the tyrant is just the beginning, of course, but would he actively sneer at the anti-tyrant movement itself? I don’t know; maybe he would if he had some weird “contrarian” reason to think the tyrant is actually a swell fella who is misunderstood.