The past five years or so have been one disappointment after another.
Firstly finding out that famous people I rather respected are complete dickholes. Of course, as a one-time music journalist, I’d long learned that a great many artists I enjoyed were utter turds. But it’s something else entirely to find out that supposedly smart, reasonable people are irrational hypocrites.
Worse than even that was realising just how many close friends and family members were subservient heel-clickers who only needed the right circumstances to bring out their inner authoritarian.
Events have conspired to rudely rip one scale after another from my eyes.
Not quite as bad as realising just which of your family are nascent fascists is finding out just how little so many supposed standard carriers for freedom… aren’t. I was never a fan of Noam Chomsky, but I respected his stance on free speech – and, then, there he is, advocating for the unvaccinated to be starved to death.
I was rather a fan of Stephen Fry. Especially his famous dictum that being “offended” was a meaningless whine.
Yet, here he is, defending a bunch of deeply weird, violently intolerant people – people who threaten to kill writers for offending them.
Fry used to be all about saying “So what?” to people who went on about feeling offended by words. His irritation with offence-takers has even become a meme. “It’s now very common to hear people say, ‘I’m rather offended by that.’ As if that gives them certain rights,” he once said. “It’s actually nothing more… than a whine. ‘I find that offensive.’ It has no meaning; it has no purpose; it has no reason to be respected as a phrase. ‘I am offended by that.’ Well, so fucking what?”
Yet, here he is, being all offended on behalf of unpleasant men in dresses.
“I have trans friends and intersex friends who are deeply upset by her,” he said when asked about [J K Rowling] on Roger Bolton’s BeebWatch podcast last week.
To which we all respond: Well, so fucking what?
Even worse than Fry’s hypocrisy, though, is his worm-like cowardice.
He then tried to even things out: “[It’s] upsetting to both sides.”
Except that one side is a demented lot of weirdos who scream and yell and threaten violence at anyone who ‘upsets’ them – and the other side is a woman who has done nothing but speak a simple, biological fact.
I know it is terribly unfashionable to make moral judgments these days, but the truth of it is that the two parties to this intellectual and social tussle are not moral equivalents. One is more judicious and righteous than the other.
One side – Rowling’s side – makes arguments that are based in truth and reason. The other does not. One side takes as its starting point the biological reality of sex. The other rejects the biological reality of sex. Hence the man who feels that he is a woman is said, by that side, to have the right to disrobe in front of women, to use the toilet alongside women, to beat women in sports and literally beat them in the boxing ring.
But Fry isn’t just a steaming hypocrite about free speech. He’s also proven that, for all his ego-stroking posturing on television, in fact, he neither knows nor cares much about actual science.
Isn’t Mr Fry pro-science? He is famously an atheist and an out and proud humanist. He once said of science, “When we want to know what is true and false, there is no better method.” Does that apply to biology, Stephen? Isn’t it the case that there is no better method to determine a person’s sex than through the science of biology?
I doubt that Fry would say that both sides in the discussion of whether Earth is spherical or flat should take a chill pill and ‘retreat’, so why is he saying it about the debate over who counts as a man or woman?
Spectator Australia
For all Fry’s porch-atheist grandstanding, he’s proven that he’s just as gullible for superstitious nonsense as some primitive worshipping the sky gods.
So, that’s another one down and outing himself as just another bullshit artist. This, hot on the heels of Sam Harris’ dementoid ranting that the media and Big Tech were right to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story.
At least Richard Dawkins, for all his faults, is still consistent.
For now.