Sleazy
Moir can’t stop digging
October 26, 2009 6 comments
Jan Moir’s unapologetic apology ((For a tedious defence of the concept “unapologetic apology”, see here.)) for her gay-hating blurt hardly improves matters:
I would like to say sorry if I have caused distress by the insensitive timing of the column
That at least makes clear the extent of Moir’s apology: if she has, on the other hand, caused distress by the lurid and utterly speculative bigotry of the original column — which she has — Moir is not sorry at all. Indeed, there is something barely credible that she still maintains:
I still maintain that to die on a sofa while your partner is sleeping with someone else in the next room is, indeed, sleazy, no matter who you are or what your sexual orientation might be.
I had to read this three times to make sure it was saying what it seemed to be saying. Even now, I can’t quite bring myself to believe it, but there it is in the unambiguous syntax of the sentence: “to die […] is […] sleazy”. Yes, how sleazy it was for Stephen Gately to die! It was somehow his own fault after all!
Moir’s own writing, of course, wholly merits being described as sleazy, not only in the modern sense of sordid, squalid and morally corrupt, but also in the old sense of “flimsy, unsubstantial” (OED 2.b.). Double-sleazy is a particularly apt epithet, as it happens, for the mouth-breathing imbecility of what follows:
My assertion that there was ‘nothing natural’ about Stephen’s death has been wildly misinterpreted. What I meant by ‘nothing natural’ was that the natural duration of his life had been tragically shortened in a way that was shocking and out of the ordinary. Certainly, his death was unusual enough for a coroner to become involved.
Yes, and what the coroner had already determined before Moir’s original column was that Gately had died of “natural causes” (namely, acute pulmonary oedema). As best as I care to bother to reconstruct Moir’s manifestly cretinous thinking in the above, it seems that she continues to believe that Gately’s life had a “natural duration” much longer than its actual duration, and therefore that “natural causes” could not possibly have cut it short.
It follows from Moir’s surprising medical-longevity theory that no one ever dies before old age except in cases of either: a) external trauma (violence, infectious agent, insufficient environmental oxygen or the like); or b) “sleazy” circumstances. This is conclusive proof that Moir is an idiot as well as a bigot, isn’t it, readers?
Tony Blair was surely the master of the non-apology apology, where one apologises because other people have supposedly taken something the wrong way and not at all because one was manifestly seen to be in the wrong.
“This is conclusive proof that Moir is an idiot as well as a bigot, isn’t it, readers?”
Yes.
I still maintain that to die on a sofa while your partner is sleeping with someone else in the next room is, indeed, sleazy, no matter who you are or what your sexual orientation might be.
Surely the implication of this is that he died because he allowed himself to be cuckolded. Perhaps that if he was a real man (gay or straight, no homophobia to see here), he would have gone in and made it a threesome. Then one of the others might have noticed his condition while he was sleeping and called an ambulance. Could that be how her mind “works”?
Dear God. I’m impressed that you resisted “roaring balls” and “hate fire.”
Stephen Fry predicted that she’d post an “I, victim” piece, which would say “isn’t it troubling blah blah freedom of speech,” but he was too charitable to assume she’d manage to throw in a shout-out to the anti-PC, anti-minority crowd, by saying “now we can’t talk about the gays.” Maybe he was just leaving her the shovel.
I at least agree that “something terrible went wrong,” although I fear it happened just before her “column ricocheted through cyberspace.” Like a dumb munition.
Having been fooled by bloggers4brownback, I’m a bit wary of attacking Brendan O’Neill, but his take on this is quite astounding.
http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/.....ree-speech
As it is, I think the Lesbian and Gay foundation were entirely wrong to report Moir to the police. This is a point worth arguing for those who are largely against government involvement in the press. But O’Neill mentions this in the midst of a disorganised article about the twitter campaign expressing distaste for Moir’s article, implying it was a coordinated ‘Orwellian’ effort to attack ‘free speech’.
The strange irony is that many of the same journalists who treat the free market with awe are the first to start whinging about the growing ‘consumerist’ element that the internet provides.
Oh, that is really a strange article. I loved the bit where O’Neill says:
Srsly?