Robin Ince quits working for the BBC over his support for men in dresses and terrorists

[SingleSexSpacesInSchools]

Shame really he’s a nice guy, a huge bibliophile, met him a few times at book signings, the last live show of his I saw he did shoehorn in “and of course trans women are real women” or some such nonsense.

guessing the infinite monkey cage is cancelled now, that was in my top five podcasts.

can’t do a popular science show and think women can have a penis though. Wonder what Brian thinks?

the video of his love resignation , presumably at the end of a monkey cage recording, is here
https://www.reddit.com/r/transgenderUK/comments/1plg02g/bbc_presenter_robert_ince_claims_he_has_been/

notably he doesn’t say how men in dresses are being treated badly. Everyone has a blind spot.

Arrested development at 6th Form stage, no?

Indeed. It's all very Adrian Mole.

I went to one of those atheist shows and bought the book and everything, was very much a wise and jolly modern atheist, but I think the point is that as you get older, ideas that seemed so simple and black and white reveal themselves to be far more complex.

So quacks are bad, yes, and exploit vulnerable people in difficult situations - but why and how do they do it? Can quacks ever actually help? Is there ever more than just 'this person goes against science so let's all chant BADDIE at them'?

Likewise religion. For all the bad it does, is there any chance that it does some good, too? To pretend it doesn't, at all, is the logic of an angry teen who doesn't have the life experience to understand social cohesion, the importance of communal taboos, the value of shared rituals, the pleasure of traditions. Of course there are downsides to religion/religions, but the point is that Ince never ever wants to engage in the grey areas.

He was always just 'teehee, I defeat homeopaths and charlatans and make pots of cash from my oh-so-savvy atheist events, I'm so clear-eyed!' I had to stop listening to IMC fairly soon in its run because it was apparent he was open neither to complexity nor evidence when it didn't match his internal narrative (which we're probably all guilty of to some extent, but to paint himself as a Great Man Of Facts fighting alongside the groundbreaking Civil Rights thinkers is, frankly, painful).

At least Adrian Mole was funny.

Pandora!
I adore ya.
I implore ye
Don’t ignore me.

Agreed.

Maybe more EJ Thribb:

So farewell then, Robin Ince

The originator of EJ Thribb, Barry Fantoni, only died in May this year, I read, though he gave up writing Thribb's verses in 2010.

That brings to mind another A Mole quote:
“I have a problem. I am an intellectual, but at the same time I am not very clever.”

idk if Ince in any way considers himself to be n ‘intellectual’ but he seems not to be quite as clever as he might like us to think.

I have no doubt that Ince identifies as clever, noble, and on the Right Side Of History

Oh dear.

I'm very entertained by him telling the whole of BlueSky that he's worked "more than [his] contracted hours".

Has he mistaken BlueSky for a discussion with his line manager?

I'm going to take this on the chin - yes I agree on some of this.

I think I first started knowing anything about Ince in the mid 2000 when I was very much following Ben Goldacre and in fact I lead the homeopathy protest outside Boots in Brighton, filmed it and added it the social media campaign, back when that sort of thing (SM) wasn't so poisoned :) "Homeopathy there's nothing in it", 10:23 campaign - maybe 2010? I am old....

I'd say Quacks always need calling out, by definition they are harmful, not some well meaning crystal waver who charges nothing and promises nothing

Was Ince smug - yes. Did he have less to back him up than Sam Harris or frankly even Ben Goldacre, yes without a doubt but he seemed fairly harmless at the time and frankly we had no idea at all this genderwang nonsense was coming so, I kept listening every time I heard him in passing - and as mentioned he's a genuine bibliophile and thats rare nowadays, the passion for the book shop, so I liked that. His stand up was very monologue, meandering, amiable, just like some nice background to listen to.

I like IMC for the same reasons I like other popular science shows like Neil DeGrasse Tyson (also a genderwanger) (Weirdly I have not listened to him since Triggernometry made him look so stupid) and Curious Cases (Hannh Fry). Frankly I don't learn very much, I know most of it, but I enjoy it and it can go on when the kids are around etc.

Is there way more too it than saying everything you do sucks.

Yes.

As I have got older I have moved from to the left of centre left and frankly I'm now centrist right on quite a lot of things. I read a lot more classic philosophy and maintain a limited spiritual practice in secular Buddhism.

The me from 2008 or so would not recognise me at all.

Yes, agree with so much of this, @SingleSexSpacesInSchools.

I think there's a lot about fame and social media that arrests development generally, and if we're free from those pressures we can make gradual or dramatic pivots and usually just have to deal with people we see face to face. For the Olivers and Zaltzmans and Inces of the world, there's so much more at stake (in their minds) and it can feel easier to chase the dragon of niche but deafening online/tribal approval, rather than ever steel-manning the arguments that now make up one's entire personality.

My younger self would have slapped my chops for how centrist I am these days, such a tiresome (in the words of Jesse Singal) pervert for nuance.

I think a lot of these guys have been shown up as frauds on more than gender, in terms of their supposed rationalism.

i remember some years ago reading a skeptic article on midwifery and homebirth, it was just awful, mainly because it associated them with granola hippies in the woods, and didn't bother to look at any of the actual research on things like outcomes. And I found that seemed to be pretty consistent, they were sceptical about people they'd determined believed in woo, but completely uncritical of anything that was mainstream medicine.

So I was not all that surprised when covid came and those same skeptic and evidence based medicine types were for the most part revealed as authoritarians who would toe the party line no matter what the evidence said.

Yes that also jumped out to me as a particularly bizarre thing to want credit for. While there was no shortage of piffle there to undermine his argument, it came across as unusually petulant and bitter.

And the poem? There’s just no words.

I've come to the conclusion they dropped him (he was a freelance) because nobody liked him as he was unbearably pompous, he was difficult to work with and he didn't contribute anything except bad poetry. I suspect the whole 'I left for my beliefs' is rubbish. He's not important enough for anyone to really care, he's not Gary Lineker. Maybe the truth will out one day.

I've been having a think about this. He says he resigned in September. But clearly stayed on until the end of the season, ie a few days ago. (Also, you can't "resign" if you're a freelancer 😆)

I strongly suspect that the BBC suggested that they might amicably part ways at the end of this run. And Robin's created his own huge bandwagon to jump on.

He's looking more Alan Partridge every day.

My guess

His contract was terminated with three month's notice
and a gag on speaking out till the end of the run.

The way he is behaving shows exactly why Prof and Mrs Cox had had enough of him.

I went to a talk by him for his book about being diagnosed with ADHD. I liked the book, and most of his talk. Except he had to mention TWAW and get a dig in about JKR. I definitely wasn't the only one rolling my eyes, I heard a couple of ladies comment about it after.

I liked IMC, but i don't have a scientific brain so didn't understand some of it (most of it. Or probably all of it) but it made me laugh.

I also wondered who in his family is trans as that's usually a factor for being a rabid ally. (See members of my own family who claim they know my relative was always meant to be a women, despite absolutely no evidence of this from birth till he transitioned in his early 30s.)

I go back that far as well, I remember the war on science that George W unleashed when he got elected President of the USA and how an earlier version of cancel culture arose because his administration was pushing Intelligent Design as a scientific theory. There seems to be a lot of people from those days that fought against the anti-science woo who seem to have fallen for the anti-science gender woo hook line and sinker, and I often wonder how are you falling for it when you didn't fall for the first lot?

I think they got use to being names and moving with the in crowd, most of them like Ince were small fry that got to swim with big sharks and when Obama came in and set science back on an equilibrium in the USA, they no longer had anything to fight for, the big sharks swam away and they had to find something to replace them with, in order to stay relevant.

Yes, I was just realising that of course he would have signed a contract for the series. No notice I suspect (because he's not an employee), just the BBC declining to renew his contract.

Sad times.

I remember some of those Sceptics in the Pub events, and there was always a huge air of unearned smugness around them, which is probably why I didn't stick around. It wasn't even the absurd fawning over Evan Harris and Ben Goldacre, it was a certain layer of people putting on swank because they were mates with Harris and Goldacre, as if they gained passive coolness by standing next to them in the pub.

It was all a bit like SWP members putting on swank because they'd had a pint with John Rees.

Glinner used to turn up at those things, but he grew out of them, or maybe he just had more interesting things to do. Ince never did.

I'm slightly surprised that he's managed to maintain a profile this long. When I hear the name Robin Ince, it's like going back in time to when Sunny Hundal had managed to blag his way into the lower reaches of the punditocracy. I hardly ever hear about Sunny now. I think his mum made him get a real job and marry a nice Sikh girl.

But if you've got a niche, you can stay in that niche a long time. I don't believe for a moment the BBC purged him for his political advocacy. I believe he's done something to foul his own nest.

After reading these comments, it seems clear that he simultaneously felt the hand of history on his shoulder and the BBC's boot on his backside whilst all the time remaining on the right side of history.

Slightly off topic but what is it with lefty men and dreadful poetry? There's a bloke near me who has a frame on a pole in his front garden and every week/month (I don't know I'm sure they're all shit so it doesn't matter) he adds a new poem for the locals. Which he then posts a picture of on Facebook and Instagram. Not even the digital world is safe from his musings.
Pretty sure I'm I'm not the only one walking past his poetry pole muttering "wanker"
You're not a poet, you're unemployed (and also a tedious arse)

I think you deserve the Mangled Metaphor prize for 2025!

On the subject of the New Atheists , I recall my teenage kids being totally enamoured of the whole movement. Until half of them came out as neo con warmongers.

Did anyone see the post on Bluesky that Ince has now deleted? About legal threats, apparently. There are still some replies, including his.

https://bsky.app/profile/markslater.bsky.social/post/3m7yadicnys2p