Posts Tagged ‘ Brendan O’Neill ’

Self-conscious contrarianism throughout history

Feb 1st, 2018 12:04 pm | By

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:

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Spotting the REAL misogyny

Jan 11th, 2018 10:10 am | By

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 … Read the rest



There’s no doubt the laundries were unpleasant

Oct 31st, 2017 11:55 am | By

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

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What we are meant to do

Oct 30th, 2017 11:02 am | By

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 … Read the rest



Never apologize

Oct 20th, 2017 10:11 am | By

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

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So drearily predictable you could replace him with an algorithm

Jul 12th, 2017 9:52 am | By

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,

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Shut up, Brendan

Nov 13th, 2016 4:55 pm | By

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,

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It won’t work, Brendan

Jul 24th, 2016 12:26 pm | By

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 … Read the rest



Brendan wants his women brainy, radical and beach-ready

Apr 29th, 2015 10:33 am | By

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

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(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)



On the other hand

Apr 24th, 2015 2:59 pm | By

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

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(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)



Teach your children well

Mar 28th, 2015 11:54 am | By

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

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(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)



Guest post: To keep the liberal-tweaking going

Mar 28th, 2015 9:30 am | By

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

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(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)



Brendan O’Neill is broken-hearted over Clarkson

Mar 27th, 2015 4:35 pm | By

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? … Read the rest

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)



A kernel

Aug 14th, 2013 11:35 am | By

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

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(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)



There was a contrarian journalist

Apr 20th, 2013 9:49 am | By

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

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(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)



Perverted chattering degenerate misanthropes hunt for witches

Oct 15th, 2012 10:52 am | By

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,

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(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)



Chopping children for god is not abuse ok

Jun 29th, 2012 12:26 pm | By

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

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(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)



Vile Brendan O’Neill

Apr 10th, 2012 4:13 pm | By

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 … Read the rest

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)



Part deux

Apr 5th, 2012 4:26 pm | By

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 … Read the rest

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)



How dare you rebel against the tyrant

Apr 5th, 2012 12:38 pm | By

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

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(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)