Laurie Penny has angered Irish feminists who say she has made the repeal of abortion laws “all about her”. The prominent activist posted an error-strewn piece on her ($4,000 a month) Patreon page which infuriated grassroots campaigners. Some highlights…
Penny described the referendum result as a “fluke” and confused the Irish legislature with the Taoiseach:
“Any fluke victory for reason and compassion in the face of religious bigotry is supposed to scrape through by the narrowest of margins. Sixty-six percent, guys. Even in the bloody countryside…”
“When the proper legislation … finally gets through the Taoiseach…”
Penny continued:
“Despair is easy, you see, after a while. You get used to the dull ache of waking up every day knowing that everything will likely get worse by the time you go to bed. Really, I barely notice it anymore. But the possbility of things *not* going completely to sh*t if we just hang on in there and keep putting hope into action?
“That just hurts in way you can’t ignore. I was more or less resigned, and now I’m going to have to go back to work and get my heart broken all over again. So f*ck you, The Irish Republic, for giving me hope, and f*ck your f*cking yes vote, too. It’s too much…”
Penny has now hidden the piece behind a paywall (it was originally free) and deleted tweets promoting it. For $50 a month, Laurie’s Patreon subscribers get a personal letter and signed photo. For 250 bucks, “we can go for dinner” and “we can have a chat about what you want to receive in return”. Perhaps her subscribers can stump up to get her to end the hot takes…
Katie Hopkins is this afternoon whacked with a bill for £24,000 in damages and at least £107,000 in costs for two tweets to food blogger Jack Monroe. Hopkins “confused” Monroe with Laurie Penny, according to The Guardian, to whom she had meant to tweet about vandalism of a war memorial during an anti-austerity protest (Penny had said she “didn’t have a problem” with the action). Monroe gave Hopkins the chance to apologise for erroneously directing tweets to her: “public apology + £5K to migrant rescue and I won’t sue.” But the former Apprentice contestant and Mail columnist instead doubled down and called Monroe “social anthrax”. Katie Hopkins doesn’t apologise…
A weary Mr Justice Warby used his judgement to slap down both parties in turn:
“The case could easily have been resolved at an early stage. There was an open offer to settle for £5,000. It was a reasonable offer… The costs would have been a fraction of those which I am sure these parties have incurred in the event… The second point is that there have been difficulties over disclosure especially on the claimant’s side… Ms Monroe’s Twitter records were extensively deleted…”
The real winners here are the lawyers…
Guido has not awarded an Order of the OTT for a while. This entry however, up on the New Statesman website this morning, was just too good to pass up:
Readers can have one guess who the author is…
Laurie Penny’s steaming hot take goes on to suggest that an intoxicated David Cameron’s alleged porcine molestation is somehow symbolic of the class struggle power dynamic, her psycho-analysis concluding that the future Prime Minister’s penetrated pig is a metaphor for the country he would go on to run:
“Power and money are accessed through the back door, or, as it may be, the pig’s mouth, and as with any kink, the eroticism isn’t about the act, but about what the act symbolises. It’s about humiliation, about control, about power play. What might the young swain have been thinking as he unzipped? What went through his head? If you ask me, I’ll bet he was thinking: Soon. Someday soon, I will do this to the whole bloody country.”
Talk about hamming it up…
