6pm debate tonight - Julie Bindel & Ayaan Hirsi Ali

[EarthSight]

Here's the link -

Be there or be square!

Oooh is this the one with Billy Bragg?

I really hope he gets his arse handed to him!

Heads up, ten minutes

AHA is brilliant

Yes it's that one!

Has BB actually turned into Jeremy Corbin?

Corbyn - bloody autocorrect

AHA is brilliant

Morton is my fave

AHA is a very clear speaker.

billy bragg talking about diversity on Britain's got talent...

'Diversity' that is

"the victims are always defenders of the status quo"

julie is answering billy (very well imho)

Go Julie!

Julie did very well there. Got a lot of information across.

I remember the anarchist book fair hounding of Helen Steel, it's what got me involved in this. Well done those activists, you certainly woke me up to campaign against you.

I don't think the term cancel culture has ended up being defined at all. Some interesting points made but I don't think any of the four fully agree on exactly what it is.

Billy deliberately quibbled about the definition to avoid the issues imo

Wow. I thought JB was terrible. She seemed to be arguing that cancel culture is fine as long as it's not directed towards feminists. KA hadn't seemed to have prepared at all. BB flopped around completely uselessly. Only AHA was worth listening to - and she was BRILLIANT.

I didn't agree with Billy Bragg on a number of things but he did come across better than he does on Twitter. Which I guess is why Twitter is a dreadful platform for any kind of proper debate.

I caught the end. At that point it seemed that Ayaan Hirsi Ali was on the ball but I wasn't convinced that Julie Bindel was being clear enough, or perhaps I mean focused enough on the point at issue. The two blokes were rubbish, for example Kehinde Andrews shouting out "Mein Kampf" to prove that anyone who disagreed with him was the sort of person who loves that book. What a div.

I didn't really get a chance to listen to this properly. I really liked AHA's speech. I too was quite baffled and annoyed by JB's assertion that cancel culture is ok as long as it's not feminists affected by it.

@queenofknives

Wow. I thought JB was terrible. She seemed to be arguing that cancel culture is fine as long as it's not directed towards feminists. KA hadn't seemed to have prepared at all. BB flopped around completely uselessly. Only AHA was worth listening to - and she was BRILLIANT.

I thought her initial 6 minute statement was good but I agree it went a bit pear shaped in places later on.

The main issue seemed to be there was no consensus on what cancel culture is.

Billy seemed to be focusing purely on social media/celebrities where as Julie moved more to real life examples of ordinary women. Ayaan was basing a lot on her own life experience of feeling cancelled/silenced and I'm not entirely sure about Kehinde - he seemed to be having a slightly different debate to everyone else.

AHA was excellent- she argued that its lazy thinking to label people like Starkey and Katie Hopkins bigots and shut them down, you need to let them speak and people can make up their own minds. I agree with her.

Kehinde Andrews' response, accompanied by a lot of patronising eye rolling was to suggest that 'well we should just let everyone read Mein Kampf'. (First person to reference Hitler loses). He was a pretty poor debater.

I like AHA's point. Let people hear offensive, distasteful ideas. And make up your own mind about it.

JB was terrible. She was so insistent that this was all about feminism and could not seem to get off that point. I know that's her experience but literally every point she made was about transactivists attacking feminists, and although I didn't disagree that's a problem, it detracted from the debate because she refused to look at the bigger picture. She made it clear that she supports cancel culture as long as it's not directed at her or people she likes! I thought that was so stupid, and I'm amazed that even the intellectual slugs arguing on the other side couldn't do anything with that.

I agree, BB was better than I expected but he kept changing the goalposts every time a point was rebutted. He isn't a very good debater or a very clear thinker. I think the debate would have gone better if it had just been him versus AHA. She would have wiped the floor with him, of course.

Towards the end, when AHA defended free speech and KA and BB started yelling 'Mein Kampf' at her and interrupting her and calling her a bigot - I thought that was despicable behaviour. AHA was just way too good for all of them.

I did like Julie's point about there being a difference between not being invited to speak/work somewhere and having an invite publicly rescinded because Twitter makes a fuss.

I was surprised that JF questioned whether AHA had personally suffered from cancel culture, knowing she has been subjected to death threats and fatwa due to expressing her opinions, and her collaborator was actually murdered.