Quote Originally Posted by Burney View Post
Well it was more watching her wither in the sheer glare of his intelligence and fall apart, I suppose. Nonetheless, I felt it was a salutary lesson in the intellectual vacuum at the heart of so many left-wing certainties. You could have put someone far cleverer than Cathy Newman in to champion those ideas and the result would have been the same because the ideas don't stand up to intellectual scrutiny.

And just because it's a mismatch doesn't mean it's not worth doing. The important thing is that these ideas - which are considered unquestionable truths in bien-pensant circles (transgenderism, limits on free speech to avoid 'offence'; the gender pay gap, etc) actually got put to the test by a brilliant analytic intelligence in a public forum and were found wanting. It is vitally important that this happens more.
Hmmmm! Sadly I think replacing Newman with a broadcaster from the right would have made little difference. I don't necessarily see the fault lines in political terms. More about an openness to ideas, or lack thereof. And that is a problem on the left and the right.

John Snow is a fúcking ****, though. Did you hear him at the end? Bemoaning the fact that the interview went on for so long, presumably because it bored him. Imagine that? Channel 4 lands an interview with one of the world's greatest living thinkers, and the anchor - one of the doyens of British political broadcasting - says it bored him.

That is what I found depressing.