Jon Ronson thinks we're stuck in the Poltergeist scene with QAnon...

Yes @nauticant that comment has the tiresome little creep wrapped. He is dishonest, disingenuous and untrustworthy.

The comments were very unimpressed, both with the article and the man himself. Led with this:

After series one it's clear that Ronson is neither a 'trustworthy guide' nor able to see both sides of an issue. Quite the opposite. The episode on 'camp trans' which protested Mich Fest, a women-only lesbian festival, was astonishingly one sided, presenting it as loving and benign. No mention of the camp trans member - Dana Rivers -who tracked down a lesbian couple, regular attendees of Mich Fest, brutally murdering them and their son. An extraordinary omission. Behind the faux-naivety Ronson is just a hack with an agenda.

It's odd he singles out gender critical. For someone who is cursed with seeing both sides he seems pretty blind to what the gender ideologists have been getting up to. Not just the mass murder committed by the Michfest guy, but all of the assaults, death and rape threats, the child abuse, state sanctioned and by trusted tw, the transwidows. You'd think for someone so cursed this would be meat and drink for his shtick.

Assuming the Times has allowed them, is there any push back in the comments?

Another male who's cross that women won't all put mothering him and other needy males ahead of their own needs. Another male using lazy tropes to push forward their agenda. Anyone who chooses, with no evidence, to tell one side of a human rights debate to roll over to make space for the other is not someone whose moral compass is straight.

Ugh, what a pathetic little tick.

he genuinely wants to understand others’ perspectives. “I’m not jaded, pre-judging or out to get anyone,” he says.

Years (decades) ago I used to read his column in the Guardian and initially found him funny but was distinctly turned off him after he wrote an article about people smiling. His angle was going up to people smiling to themselves and asking them what they were smiling about. Obviously only to generate content for a column. He was utterly judgemental with sneery condescending comments because one young woman (and of course it would only be a woman he’d judge) was smiling thinking of her daughter getting professional photos wearing angels wings.

What makes Ronson such a trustworthy guide to our age is that he genuinely wants to understand others’ perspectives. “I’m not jaded, pre-judging or out to get anyone,” he says. “I’m enthusiastic. By the time I approach someone to interview them, I’ve been down so many rabbit holes I’m just excited and curious.”

that's dishonest. I listened to him being interviewed on a podcast and he said he was worried she would ask him about the trans issue. He really did not want to be asked anything in any depth about it.

I guess he's only comfortable when he can ask questions rather than have to articulate his own views.

Yes that's the one. It's a single chapter and I read it long before I had any real consciousness about transgender beyond the occasional old school transexual.

I was reading about this lesbian couple, one an uber high powered exec, the other facilitating the execs lovely life.

The exec was obsessed with building a duplicate of her wife so she could still have her if she died.

Obviously it was completely barking on any level, but it also just rang completely false in terms of any female relationship that I'd experienced or witnessed.

Is this the interview that says he was badly bullied as a child? I suspect that left scars that continue to limit his ability to write honestly on many subjects.

Lost at Sea?

https://skepchick.org/2014/09/skepchick-book-club-lost-at-sea/

In which book did Ronson write about Martine Rothblatt?

genevievegluck.substack.com/p/trans-activist-to-stand-trial-for

Reduxx had a lot on this I believe..

I am increasingly angry about this concept of ‘culture wars’. It’s used as a way to dismiss concerns and it’s not ok.

People disagreeing with your preferred ideology is not a war, cultural or otherwise. You don’t need to categorise everyone as allies or enemies.

My respect for him plummeted when several years ago he admitted he was stockpiling Tamiflu for a flu pandemic that never came. My priorities are not his. he doesn't understand science.

Is that person still in a female prison? That really is the final insult if so.

Some more information in this twitter thread -

x.com/simonjedge/status/1669233491400171522?s=20

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/06/25/the-shameful-silence-over-dana-rivers/

"forgot to mention that the harmless, fluffy Mich Fest protests ended in a TRA murdering a lesbian couple and their son,"

I've not heard about this, can anyone fill me in or shoot a link my way about this?
Tried googling, but unsurprisingly not much is coming up - I'd imagine because no one likes to report on TRA's doing bad things because it doesn't fit the narrative :S

as a slight aside - it looks like someone has drawn those glasses on his face

Easy to think that he is capable of the astonishing deed of seeing both sides on some issue when he is not at all affected by either side.

It's not Ronson's rights which are being reallocated in the gender wars, but those of women and girls, and many of those rights were fought for and won only quite recently, with great sacrifices.

He belongs to the male sex class which is not asked to give up its language or awards or places on the podium or face increased danger in its single-sex spaces.

Neither is the male class negatively affected by the "sex work is a good career" or "surrogacy is empowering" types of arguments. It's the female sex which is rapidly being turned into an exploitable resource.

One thing I noticed a while ago is that those who use the term "culture wars" tend to use it as a shorthand for there being one, bad, side that's effectively a basket of deplorables being people who won't accept a fixed set of "progressive" political views as being beyond question. There's no examination of the "other side" in the "war", and whether some of their views might actually be undesirable in any way.

Id have thought that he would be interested in why some topics are seen as culture wars, rather than just accepting the term and what is and isnt part of it.

A good starting point would be who decides what is a culture war and what isnt.

This guy totally creeps me out. Even his ' butter wouldn't melt ' faux naive speaking voice sets my teeth on edge.
Glinner said once the Ronson got in touch , apparently to see if they could find some common ground. But GL soon realised it was a fishing expedition. Ugh.

The man who was very curious about Martine Rothblatt's attempt to create a similcrum of her wife...

...but not curious enough to mention at any point in the book chapter that Rothblatt was male. Resulting in a very odd read where something felt very, very odd but you couldn't put your finger on what.

Of course it all fell into place when I discovered the latter fact, Rothblatt's voice and attitudes reading as the most masculine manly xy un-reconstructed male to ever man.