Stephen Fry Deactivates Twitter Account, Attacks Culture of Self-Righteous Laceration

I saw this on Red Eye.

Steven Fry was a presenter at the BAFTA awards (the British Oscars, where they split the awards in every category between Downton Abbey and Doctor Who). A woman won an award for costume design on Mad Max: Fury Road. She came to the podium dressed, well, I guess you'd call it shabby chic, but without the chic.

So he said something like, "Only a great fashion designer can come to pick up her award for costume design while dressed as a bag lady."

Which was true.

This apparently was too much for the pursed-lip, puckered-asshole scolds of social media, who leapt to denounce him for what we called, in an earlier age, an obvious sort of "joke" which was simply amusing because it was true.

He deactivated his Twitter account, but this isn't about Twitter, really. This is about the dogmatic zealots who are making life horrible.

Here's part of Fry's rant:

[L]et us grieve at what twitter has become. A stalking ground for the sanctimoniously self-righteous who love to second-guess, to leap to conclusions and be offended -- worse, to be offended on behalf of others they do not even know.

It's as nasty and unwholesome a characteristic as can be imagined. It doesn't matter whether they think they’re defending women, men, transgender people, Muslims, humanists... the ghastliness is absolutely the same. It makes sensible people want to take an absolutely opposite point of view. I've heard people shriek their secularism in such a way as to make me want instantly to become an evangelical Christian.

These people need to wear Trigger Warnings on themselves so we can ostracize them, shun them, and humiliate them into shame-eating until they all die of insulin shock.

posted by Ace at 06:30 PM

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