The Rest is Entertainment

[deadpan]

Marina Hyde (Guardian columnist) and Richard Osman's YouTube podcast The Rest is Entertainment did an episode on Tuesday about the Davie resignation along with other items.
They both discussed the Trump non saga and also mentioned the gender critical comments made in the memo/letter from Prescott.
They both made mild and sensible comments about how "a lot of people" would have been upset by certain things such as victims of male assault being made to refer to their attacker with female pronouns.
Obviously there were the usual "transphobe" claimants in the comments, but I was surprised they touched on it at all especially as Marina writes for the Guardian.
I'd love to include the link, but the episode isn't in the videos list with all the others. It's possible they had to take it down because overshadowing the TRA's were the people who think the BBC is the work of the devil. So there could have been a lot of comments that might have caused the removal 🤔

I listened to the episode
it was 29 mins and 30 seconds about TV / gossip / trivia.
30 seconds (in fact less!) on this issue

I think Marina is just up to date with the “vibe shift” generally as she is on social media a lot and follows its culture. She’s just blowing with the current winds.

Was just ansering a PP's question, as they seemed confused.

As for the episode, to pronounce such a literal genocidal heresy would have got MH cancelled not that long ago. So it's worth commenting on.

Good point. Her head was not over the parapet earlier, was it? Especially as she has a column in the Grauniad.

Still, it's all progress.

I am almost certain MH made a comment on that podcast only a few weeks ago which suggested she thought women who didn’t want men in their spaces were simply being dramatic.

In all honesty I find it difficult to square the universal praise MH receives. I would love to know how many phones she did or did not hack back in the day when she was pals with Piers Morgan.

Yes, TriP are absolutely terrible and I gave up listening because it just seemed such an enormous issue they were hand-waving away. But MH in particular hasn't made any secret of finding the whole TRA thing ridiculous - while she hasn't said outright on the podcast "The TRA thing is ridiculous", she's made enough sardonic comments about gender woo, that RO has agreed with, that I think they're both firmly on the gender realist end of the spectrum.

I think as someone else said earlier (but perhaps with the opposite angle) it's what she doesn't say that shows her as GC - she never recites the TWAW mantras or talks about any brave rainbow journeys. In fact, I think she's been quite scathing about Dylan Mulvaney and that ilk as grifters who seize their moment (I could be wrong)? I've got no time for Osman, but I've read a lot of her writing and think she's intelligent and thoughtful, whatever skeletons there might be.

and yet here you are in the FWR section of the board moaning that we are talking about women's rights? make it make sense.

They were discussing the BBC. I'm fairly sure that comes under the remit of "entertainment".

Anyway, it's up to them what they discuss on their massively popular podcast. Not you.

Marina is smart and quick. I dont know if she is GC but she did talk at length abour Neil Gaiman's alleged abuse, which was appreciated.

The appeal of the podcast is the breadth of it - everything from video games to what order to do NYT puzzles in.

If I want a GC podcast, I listen to This Isnt Working or Seen in Journalism podcasts.

I can understand wanting light-hearted entertainment. I find if I read this board before bed I'm usually too angry to sleep!

But the posters here are not hijacking a lighthearted topic and ruining it for you. This is the board where women's rights are discussed and the podcasters said a little about a very relevant topic. So that's why it's being talked about. There will be other threads at other times which are about lighthearted content on this podcast but they'll probably appear on another thread.

If they’d have dedicated more than the few seconds they did to this issue - i would have turned it off. I don’t listen to this podcast for anything aside from froth and trivia.

And both of them know that 99.99999% of their audience will be the same.

Yup

I noticed this and mentioned it on the other Tim Davie thread, thought it was worth discussing as iwhether Marina is GC is a conversation that has popped up here from time to time.

The thing that struck me is that plenty of people are discussing the BBC only in the context of the Trump problem (esp in the Graun). The rest can easily be ignored if people don’t want to go there, which is why I cheered when MH did, with clarity, and expressly and deliberately said ‘males’ instead of ‘trans women’. I thought that was really telling that she didn’t fudge it.

I like the style of the podcast anyway, I think they are both good communicators, very knowledgeable, and do give a full picture of what they speak.

It was obvious Richard was going to leave this one to the women though - a niche issue to someone like him, it felt.

I don’t usually look at comments but will check them out as it is depressing there has been a pile on.

There's not really a trans pile on. I mean there might have been, but there are a lot more comments now, mostly about the BBC in general and Trump.

I think MH and RO are both in the camp of "media luvvies who know where the power lies and don't want the dinner party invitations to dry up, so they keep themselves willfully ignorant".

In recent years, I find myself more tolerant of the true believers than I am of this sort of wishy-washy gutlessness. At least the true believers are engaging with the issue. You can talk to them. They will scream and froth at the mouth and call you a phobe, but many of them end up compelled to seek TERFs out and hear what we're saying, because they're so offended by our existence. Their intent is to play moral superior, of course, but there's always the chance a little seed of doubt will stick with them after the interaction is over. And sometimes that seed grows into a hardy little tree root of sanity, that comes up and buckles the concrete of the groupthink until it eventually breaks through into sunlight.

With the willfully cognitively dissonant though, there's nothing you can do. There's no way to reach them, because their self-preservation instinct is so strong they flee at the mere hint the conversation is headed in a trans direction. Usually these are smart people who know they wouldn't be able to justify the ideology if they really had to think about it. They don't want to have to make the active choice to turn a blind eye or defend the indefensible. So they cling to the only thing they have left: their ignorance. If they can just say they never knew . . . if they can just avoid looking too closely at it all . . . if they can just mumble a bit about being kind, maybe they can make it through this unscathed. And then when the tide of public opinion has safely turned, and their peers won't turn on them for speaking up, they can join in the conversations about how awful all this was, and pretend they've only just found out about it.

There's something so slimy about people like that. Especially as the conversation gets louder and louder, and you know it must be taking real effort to avoid it, at this point. Particularly for journalists, and media types who make online discourse their living.

So they cling to the only thing they have left: their ignorance. If they can just say they never knew . . . if they can just avoid looking too closely at it all . . . if they can just mumble a bit about being kind, maybe they can make it through this unscathed.

You are being far, far to kind to them here. They are not ignorant. They know full well that men cannot be women.

They are craven, cowardly, and selfish. But soon, as the tide continues to turn and their livelihoods are not threatened by stating the truth, they will start to get all reasonable about it all.

I know what you mean about finding the true believers more palatable than the wimps. Likewise, I prefer transgender people, who are, after all, advocating for themselves, which is understandable, over Stonewall which was an activist organisation without a cause after gay marriage was made legal.

I think transgender people should be able to sue Stonewall for misleading them (and all the useful idiots in power) about their rights.

I don’t think I can blame them for keeping quiet, it’s frustrating that more people don’t speak up but given the tantrums and abuse when people do I can understand why people keep quiet. They touched on the subject so gently this week and yet half the comments on Spotify seem to be accusing them of transphobia/being terfs/threatening never to listen again. Well, when I say “them” obviously almost all of it is directed against Marina.

I'm getting the feeling that Richard is very much a "#bekind, let's all get along together and ignore the issues that make me feel a bit incomfortable, especially since I personally am not affected by them" sort of man.

I’ve just got around to listening to this. I thought their (brief) comments about the BBC describing male rapists as ‘she’ and Martine Croxall’s eye roll sounded GC. I also think they wouldn’t have been as open as this just a week or two ago.