Some blowhard
Laurie Penny decided to go all-in.
Imagine you’re throwing a party and somebody kicks off. It was going so well. You spent ages deciding on drinks and making a playlist, and now some blowhard is off on a homophobic rant. He’s not holding back, either. He’s getting loud and mouthing off with the vilest bigotry you can imagine, and people are getting uncomfortable. It’s your party. What do you do?
Well, one, it wouldn’t happen, because I don’t throw parties, and I have zero interest in drinks or playlists. Two – why would you invite “some blowhard” to your own party? If he’s “some blowhard” to you – some random unpleasant guy you don’t even know – what’s he doing at your party? So, three, I don’t believe your little thought experiment in the first place. Never mind, it’s not a real thought experiment. It’s a circuitous path to calling Graham Linehan names in a Substack post.
This is my first post on Substack, and it’s partly about why I’m on this platform, given that Substack continues to host and profit from the propaganda of, among others, transphobic hatemonger Graham Linehan.
Like that.
She’s a bit of a “hatemonger” herself, isn’t she – at least, those four words certainly look like hatemongering.
But wait, she’s not finished.
The best and most comprehensive breakdown of Linehan’s behavior and why it’s so abhorrent comes from Grace Lavery, also on this platform. I share her conviction that Substack ought to throw this deranged bigot out of their party right now, before anyone else gets hurt.
Does “deranged bigot” count as hatemongering? Or is that only when They do it?
I told my contacts at Substack that they ought to ban Linehan, along with anyone else doing deliberate, wilful, hateful harm to any oppressed minority.
Item 3. I think accusing someone of “doing deliberate, willful, hateful harm to an oppressed minority” is hatemongering.
What does it mean, then, when a company like Substack chooses to host this sort of malicious hate speech…?
She says “this sort” as if she had provided examples, but she hadn’t. She gave zero examples, she simply asserted – and in very strong language at that. This is childish. “Joey said bad things. Horrible things. Really really mean things. Joey must be expelled right now for this sort of malicious hate speech.”
Graham responded a couple of days later.
Grace Lavery is all excited.
Not just “vile bigot” I think. That could perhaps be defended as opinion (I don’t know enough about UK law to skip the “perhaps”). But hatemonger? Doing deliberate harm? Those claims look much harder to defend.
Imagine you’re joining an online platform that provides publishing, payment, analytics, and design infrastructure to support subscription newsletters. There’s a wide and varied membership of writers already using this publishing platform, including one whose opinions you really don’t like. You drink an entire bottle of Chablis, stumble to the computer, and sit down, fingers poised above the keyboard. What do you do?
It’s not your own party, Penny. But cry all you want.
Language used by Penny to refer to Linehan and his behaviour:
Some blowhard, homophobic, mouthing off with the vilest bigotry you can imagine, this fucker, transphobic hatemonger, deranged bigot, homophobe who is, by now, getting up in your other guests’ faces and making himself everyone’s problem and yours in particular, wingnut, shouting about how gay men are perverts who can’t be trusted around children.
Language used by Linehan to refer to Penny and her behaviour:
Defamatory.
Which is the blowhard?
I didn’t include the language she used in the hypothetical as language she used to refer to Linehan, because she kind of has deniability there. It’s obviously a sleazy trick, of course, but on the other hand she used so much defamatory language directly about him that it didn’t really matter.
Blowhards and other undesirables usually get into your parties as the “plus one”.
Was at one party where a nice work friend turned out to be married to this super skeevy guy. Within a half hour every woman there was giving him a 20’ berth because they didn’t want to interact with him or be leered at by him.
At another one a coworker’s wife, whom we hadn’t met before, seemed to be seething with hatred toward everyone except her husband. We were all like, lol, wtf did we do?
At a school auction/party we found out one teacher — friendly, intelligent, competent, helpful, somewhat low-key — was married to, yes, the stereotypical blowhard. Tall, somewhat overweight, super loud, full of himself, talking all the time, making insulting “jokes” about other people, drinking too much while accusing other people of being drunk, etc. He was super into baseball, so I tried to make small talk using the tiny amount I knew about baseball, and I mentioned something that was apparently a sore point for him because it had kept “his” team out of the World Series (many years previously), and so he got all sulky about it. I initially thought he was kind of doing a bit, but then I realized he was actually really upset about the stupid sports event and quite angry at me for mentioning it, so he stopped talking to me. Which was fine with me.
This wasn’t actually a post about how undesirables get into your parties.
Imagine you’re at a party on the beach, with some of your family and a handful of wonderful, beautiful guys, some of whom you just met. And there’s a lull in the conversational rhythm into which the boyfriend of a young man you adore so much you joke about adopting him says “I’m not queer. Queer is a lifestyle choice, it’s a political allegiance, it’s a fashion statement. I’m not queer, I’m gay. I love men, and that involved zero choice on my part.” People look sideways, and worry momentarily that someone censorious will yell at them, but the conversation picks up and washes everybody away again in the joy of company.
(Which is to say, imagine last Saturday. God save me from a cocktail party involving the likes of Laurie Penny. And what the hell would Penny know about homophobia? Who gave Penny, as a heterosexual woman, permission to appropriate gay culture?)
Defamatory? It really depends on the jurisdiction doesn’t it. In the UK Lineham might stand a chance, but then the UK’s defamation laws are an abomination. They were originally intended to protect the thin-skinned honour of the nobility. In the US I doubt Lineham would get past go. Defences of hyperbole and opinion seem pretty strong there. Depending on the jurisdiction it may even be addressed via the equivalent of anti-SLAPP laws (I know Texas has something that comes into play for defamation claims).
What I find interesting, and have mentioned before, is how many Twitter-prominent US lawyers are quite vociferous in their defence of trans rights, even when their politics are conservative. It seems to be part a 1A thing, part a hatred of UK defamation law, part a ‘what’s the big deal if they want to identify as’ thing and partly because many of them seem to be Twitter/professional/personal friends with a couple of high profile lawyers who are trans. Anyone in their timeline who raises the slightest gender critical thought will be mocked and blocked on the spot. I’ve never seen one of them provide the slightest serious analysis for their stance.
Sastra@1:
Alright, that made me guffaw! I rarely see a person’s essence captured so perfectly, but Penny being the simpleton that she is, a simple characterization like this does the job very well. Plus it’s just damned funny!
Rob, I think he’d have a chance here in the US. “[D]eranged hatemonger” and ” deliberate, wilful, hateful harm to [an] oppressed minority” aren’t merely hyperbolic opinion; those are pretty specific charges. IANAL but it sounds like libel to me.
Lady Mondegreen, I’m not a lawyer either, in fact I don’t even play one on TV ;-). All I know about defamation law I’ve learnt through watching mostly US lawyers debate it on Twitter or explain it on NPR. blogs or substack. I tend to listen to those who correctly predict the outcome of trials.
I can see deranged hate monger being defended as hyperbole, not a provable statement of fact (although I can think of individuals it could be proved against). Deliberate, wilful and hateful harm to a minority – maybe that one is provable, although I guess the defence might be opinion formed on the basis of disclosed facts? Where’s Screechy when you need him?
Got to love to how the male Mister Lavery is all in a hot lather encouraging a real woman to put her reputation and money on the line for Mister Lavery’s benefit. If Penny ends up losing it all in a court case, I sure hope she does not expect Mister Lavery to throw a bent dime her way because guys like him never help out real women. Look at the pictures Mister Lavery posts of his wife —- showing how he degrades her.
Lavery is so transparently awful he reminds me of a Scooby Do villain. One day he will end up in court for, I’m betting, some kind of violent sexual abuse, and they will rip off his mask and say oh my god you were Grey Slavery all along and he’ll say “I would have gotten away with it too if it weren’t for you meddling women!”
Which makes it all the more amazing that he’s an employed academic, at the University of California BERKELEY – not one of your more humble or obscure institutions.