Stephen Fry - Stonewall "nonsensical"

[fromorbit]

Another Reverse Ferret dashes out of cover.

Stonewall ‘has got stuck in a terrible quagmire,' Stephen Fry tells Triggernometry. ‘I have no interest or support of this current wave of nonsensical… It’s shameful and sad.’

The Rise of the Right is the Left's Fault - Stephen Fry

Good to see on one level, but irritating at the same time Fry didn't support the truth when it was hard. He also slags off Dave Chappelle for truth telling in the same interview. Someone tried to kill him though. Thousands of women faced death threats for saying biology is real, lost jobs and opportunities. Kids had their lives ruined.

More to the point now Fry feels it is safe to come out it shows we are winning, but a LOT more to do and the genderists will resist every step of the way.

He did not, however, condemn those who were bullying her and threatening her with death, rape and all manner of other lovely violent actions.

He failed to address the issue that it is quite explicitly not all sides, there is only one side that threatens to kill JKR and carrying signs at a Pride march saying exactly that.

His defence of JKR if you want to call it that was weak and cowardly the same as everyone else who has said JKR has a right to her opinion followed by a but they just have their eye on the next pay cheque.

He can a bit cluelessly sexist, but I feel he deserves a bit of leeway in this instance. He defended her gently and didn’t clearly condemn her attackers, however, he is bi-polar, very sensitive, once went AWOL and made a suicide attempt because he couldn’t handle criticism. I think he is entitled to open himself up to the level of backlash he can handle and no more - for the sake of his mental health.

You've both missed his "play" about child sexual abuse, his berating of victims of child sexual abuse, and his support for making it as difficult as possible for parents (ie mothers) to protect their children from full on queer at school then. Suggest you go back and look before handwaving him away as probably alright. He's not.

I didn't know he was sensitive and couldn't handle criticism. He's often quoted as saying so fucking what when people get offended.

I don't really think that's fair, he didn't say "but" and he wasn't hesitant in his defense either, and maybe more importantly, he continued to work with her, speak to her, and publicly be involved in her projects.

I expect it didn't occur to him he needed to publicly say that people making rape threats were not ok.

Thank you! I wondered what everyone was talking about as just listened yesterday to the whole interview. Thought that FF and KK were a bit star-struck to be honest. But I haven't followed much of their interviews, so maybe they are always fairly superficial which I thought this thing was. Like with the Dave Chappelle comment, not asking "what was it that he said that was punching down" and just leaving it hanging. A lot, an awful lot was just left hanging to be honest and SF was just rabbiting on about stuff.

You misspelled 'describing'.

An article by Malcolm Clark that sums up a lot of the stuff in this thread

https://thecritic.co.uk/the-cowardice-of-sir-stephen-fry/

Seeing it all condensed together it's actually quite nauseating. Can't believe this dodgy character, who seems quite blasé about paedophilia, is getting a knighthood.

They might well have been star struck. I do think in some ways though their interviews are often a little superficial.

Their initial interest in many of these areas was initially around freedom of discourse questions, and they still tend to come from that perspective in particular. But their interviews themselves are not probably the highest calibre. I don't mean that as an insult at all, it's not easy to find the very best interviewers, it's a skill and a gift, IMO. It helps a lot of the interviewer is very broadly educated, and often they are largely self-educated IME - they can think on their feet and ask questions from a very broad knowledge set.

The Triggernormaty guys aren't quite that good. Where they do really well is that they give the guests lots of time and opportunity to talk about the things they know about, and when the guest is a very insightful person you really get a chance to learn about their ideas.

@TempestTost thanks for that. This was the first full interview by them I saw to be honest. A bit more Michael Parkinson than Emily Maitliss, I suppose.

Agreed,though I do easily believe the establishment would knight a man who has expressed this views.

I do easily believe the establishment would knight a man who has expressed this views

Sadly, he's not exactly an aberration.

Don't demonise those who step-up. Welcome them and be glad they have seen sense.

Has he seen sense, though?

...elsewhere in his interview Fry chose, without any prompting, to restate the core claim of transgender ideology — the one from which all the horrors of medicalising children stem: the claim children can be born in the wrong body. Asked about the importance of freedom of expression in comedy Fry used the opportunity to complain that too many comedians allegedly use their freedom of speech to “punch low”, citing as his sole example … children who believe “they are born into the wrong body”.
“I mean does no one have sympathy for some poor child who believes they are born into the wrong body? This has happened for thousands of years,” said Fry.

and

Fry went on to applaud the “courage” of children who tell their school they are the opposite sex even though the Cass Review concluded social transition like this should be avoided. It risks crystallising in a child’s mind a passing fantasy.

I believe in the Golden Bridge, but SF has not seen sense at all and does not deserve to cross. He repeats all the lies, right there in front of us. But he utters one sentence against Stonewall and we are supposed to think he has rethought this. He has not.

Interesting. Bookmarking to read later once I’ve watched the video

I wonder if he isn't just taking people at their word that as children they felt they were "born in the wrong body".

Thinking about it, when people start to question this stuff, there is often a long period where they become more and more disenchanted. If they were part of the group that tended to take the whole thing as presented, they may first start to see some very concrete issues - maybe things like men in women's sports.

But they tend to take at face value that people are being smart - that medical people know what they are doing when they support GI - and that people are being honest about their own experience.

It can take a long time for people to really see that there are major failures in the medical system, or to start questioning the honesty or good faith of some of the activists describing their experience. That's a whole other set of scales to fall.

We can definitely cope just fine without him. Read the Critic article to see why.

He hasn't remotely stepped up.

The utter disgrace that someone who, amongst other things, minimises child sexual abuse gets a knighthood. Says it all about who gets revered and listened to in this country, and it is not women and children. Fucking disgrace.

And Trig's interview was fawning lightweight and lame.

I mean, ‘Sir Jimmy Saville’ should tell you all you need to know about the ‘Honours’ system.

Time they dropped the ‘Empire’ bit as well, while we’re about it. The whole thing is an embarrassment, and I can’t help but think less of the people who accept these baubles.

Hewitt and her PIE past. She just got a Damehood.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patricia_Hewitt

In terms of Labour, gongs/elevations and PIE, she also is not alone. But we digress.

🤦🏼‍♀️

I respect Clark's perspective. I'm still of the mind that this has to be framed as a golden bridge.

There are people who don't know the past (current?) abhorrent attitudes that Fry has espoused. They know little about this entire area beyond #BeKind. Those people will not read around, engage critical faculties, and independently arrive at an informed view.

They would, however, accept that somehow, in some way, someone they admire or vaguely like as an 'approaching' national treasure status or intellect, seems to have changed his mind about something that they don't understand. And that will be enough for them.

Years ago, Helen Joyce said that it will only be when men say something that others will listen. And will somehow discover that they thought it all along. It will all have to be tolerated. There is negligible personal cost to SF unlike the brave women who've lost so much. SF hasn't said that much but look at the ripples of that. And it doesn't even involve SF having a declared public change of heart or mind.

There's a Telegraph article, a Wikipedia link that's not broken!

https://archive.ph/Td8aR

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/10666875/Patricia-Hewitt-called-for-age-of-consent-to-be-lowered-to-ten.html

I'm struggling to square this

She said: “NCCL in the 1970s, along with many others, was naïve and wrong to accept PIE's claim to be a ‘campaigning and counselling organisation that ‘does not promote unlawful acts’.

"I should have urged the council to take strong measures to protect NCCL’s integrity from the activities of PIE members and sympathisers and I deeply regret not having done so."

With this (my bold)

A National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL) press release quoted in The Sun issued in Miss Hewitt’s sole name in Mach 1976 read: “NCCL proposes that the age of consent should be lowered to 14, with special provision for situations where the partners are close in age or where the consent of a child over ten can be proved.”

I'm not sure how you mean? It looks like back in the 1970s she was very naive and took at face value their goals, and supported their campaigns, and then later regretted it?

I can see that it's hard to understand how people could be so foolish, but it doesn't seem inconsistent.