To call Brendan O'Neill a professional contrarian would be to elevate him to the status of something he isn't. Brendan O'Neill is a troll. A professional troll, but a troll nonetheless.
To call Brendan O’Neill a professional contrarian would be to elevate him to the status of something he isn’t. Brendan O’Neill is a troll. A professional troll, but a troll nonetheless.
The Brendan O’Neill formula is a simple but effective one: work out what any reasonably decent human being would think about an issue and write the opposite.
With that in mind we’ve compiled five of the stupidest things Brendan O’Neill has ever written to give you an idea of how his whole get up works.
1. In an Age When It’s Trendy to Be Ill, Angelina Jolie’s Mastectomy Revelation Is Far From Rebellious
Angelina Jolie announced on Tuesday that she had undergone a double mastectomy after learning that by doing so she would reduce her risk of breast cancer from 87 per cent to five per cent. Jolie made her announcement in an article for the New York Times, and as a result earned praise from breast cancer experts for highlighting the heightened genetic predisposition to breast cancer run by women who’ve inherited a faulty version of either the BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene from one of their parents.
Most people had absolutely no problem with that. Brendan O’Neill felt otherwise:
“Is she really rebelling against celebrity culture or conforming to it? You know what would have been truly brave, properly rebellious, delivering a little personal blow to today’s conformist celebrity culture of talking about sickness and scrubbing away the line between private life and public life? If Ms Jolie had never told anyone except her family about her decision to have surgery.”
2. Homosexuals were once branded as mentally disordered. Now homophobes are treated the same way
Until relatively recently gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender individuals risked being jailed, beaten, fined, publicly humiliated, murdered, mutilated and ostracised from public life. In many parts of the world that’s still the case, and as I reported for the Independent on Sunday in 2011, hate crime is something many LGBT folk continue to experience.
According to Brendan O’Neill, though, homophobes are now treated in much the same way:
“In the past, moralists and psychologists conspired to depict homosexuality as a mental disorder. Today, in a flip reversal so profound it could give you a headache, gay rights activists and their cheerleaders depict homophobia as a mental disorder. The sinned against have become the sinners.”
Strangely enough, lots of people don’t think it’s acceptable to inflict pain on animals for the titillation of human spectators, be that through bear baiting, cock fighting or, indeed, making horses jump over unnaturally high fences. Not Brendan, though.
The fact that right-thinking people are increasingly concerned about the number of horses dying after being pushed to the limit by well-paid jockeys so that bookmakers can make a great deal of money doesn’t rile Brendan, however:
“It’s just a horse, a dumb, unfeeling creature, unaware of pain, unaware even of its own existence, and with no concept of past, present or future. When you whip a horse it doesn’t think, “This is so painful and humiliating”, because it is incapable of thought. It just runs.”
4. Posh-bashing has replaced prole-bashing as the nastiest strain in British politics
Considering the fact that more than half of the cabinet were educated at independent schools, with two attending Eton; and despite the fact that polling in recent years has shown attitudes hardening significantly towards the poor, it is the chinless and plummy-voiced who are the most persecuted group in Britain, according to Brendan O’Neill.
Rather than let it console him that 24 per cent of vice-chancellors, 32 per cent of MPs, 51 per cent of top Medics, 54 per cent of FTSE-100 chief execs and 54 per cent of top journalists went to private school, O’Neill believes posh people are the new “outsiders”:
“Indeed, posh-bashing has eerie echoes of that older pastime of prole-bashing. In both instances, in both today’s pseudo-radical assaults on toffs and yesteryear’s reactionary attacks on a feckless underclass, moralism stands in for serious analysis and invective takes the place of cool-headed commentary.”
5. Breivik: a monster made by multiculturalism
Anders Behring Breivik’s deranged worldview led to him carrying out a sequential bombing and mass shooting in Norway in 2011 which claimed 77 lives. Breivik was very clear about why he went on his rampage: to promote his fascist manifesto which called for the forced deportation of all Muslims and the violent annihilation of “Eurasia”.
Much like the rape apologist views the rapist as the creation of the woman in the short skirt, to Brendan O’Neill Anders Breivik was created by the very thing he sought to destroy – multiculturalism:
“Breivik is not an implacable foe of multiculturalism; he is a product of it. He is multiculturalism’s monster, where his true aim is to win recognition of his identity alongside all those other identities that are fawned over in modern Europe. In essence, his barbarous act last year was not about dismantling multiculturalism but about expanding it…”.
Don’t feed the troll
The most important thing with any troll is not to feed them. Like a big fat hungry caterpillar chewing on a luscious green slice of lettuce, a troll feeds on the ‘outrage’ generated by their ‘opinions’ and gets hooked on it.
As a rule, you should ignore Mr O’Neill. DO NOT express outrage and DO NOT Tweet or Facebook his articles in order to show your companions how disgusted you are. In other words, do not hand him the big green slice of outrage lettuce he craves.
I note that in writing this article I’ve sort of fallen foul of my own sage advice, but I thought you knowing how his whole ‘journalism’ thing works would be worth it. I won’t do it again.
42 Responses to “Don’t feed the troll: The five stupidest Brendan O’Neill articles”
Rebecka
Pleased to find this. Feeling confused: Bought a Big Issue – a magazine I really want to support – only to find his column applauding Cameron’s cutting of sickness benefits to prevent people from ‘festering’ on welfare… The cuts are in fact swelling the number of vendors selling the magazine. There’s an unbelievably ugly irony in asking the homeless to promote his column, and I wish I could boycott him without boycotting the Big Issue.
gulberwick
You should be banned. You’re one of the worst trolls I’ve ever seen.
Hugh7
So “The latest anti-Semitic cry: ban circumcision: Foreskin-envying hippies and Eurocrats are waging war against an age-old tradition, under the guise of ‘human rights’ ” http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9055801/the-first-cut/?utm_source=A
can be number six. Protecting babies from having their genitals cut is antisemitic, and human rights go in scare-quotes now? I don’t think so.
Steve Darragh
Unless of course you can completely annihilate and make him an embarrassment for the publication he writing for. Probably will not get through the vetting process!
My answer to his article regarding the new use of the gay word…
The kids around my way are now using ‘you gay nigger’ innocently as a
lighthearted insult and niggerish meaning naff and rubbish etc too.
I identify gay culture as a ridiculously high and totally
disproportionate percentage of the World population. By this I mean it
covers every aspect of culture from low end commercial trashy pop music
to top end classical and avant-garde and everything in-between. For an
estimated less than 10% of the population being responsible for a
greater % of all the arts, far larger than the remaining 90%.
However, I do believe that the unique psychology belonging to
homosexuals can have a drastic influence on their creative abilities.
Characteristics that lead from homosexuality (such as enforced or
voluntary rejection of stereotypical gender roles, social isolation, the
lack of a natural family etc.etc.) can lead to an increased interest
into the creative mediums.
It’s also possible that if homosexuality is actually biologically
inherent, the predilection for musical talent and other forms of
creativity come with it.
Gays are not without sin either as for a long time they have used the word
straight to mean the exact same as the word gay has adopted now, ie
naff, rubbish, crap, boring,bland etc so perhaps this is divine
retribution! I do believe the sign of a civilised society is when the
majority recognise and protect the rights of minorities.
Afterall 90% can hurt the 10% to a much greater degree than vice versa.
As for the culture debate, a quality rag such as yourselves would have a
greater degree of input from gay culture than perhaps you underestimate.
Think designers, photographers, the arts, fashion, journalism, interior
decoration, general design in fact all but the sports section which is
seen by gays as not worthy of much creative input and hence why there is
not a high proliferation of gay personalities but perhaps that is
debate for another time .For now, Only stupid people are using gay as an
insult. A fact the Telegraph should face up to. Get over it!
The Gay Telegraph… now there’s a thought.
James Abrahams
yes! This person really really misses the point of Brendan in pretty much all those articles. At no point does he really argue against anything Brendan is saying. Just says “The title of these articles makes me sad!!! Lets call this guy names!!!”