Julie Burchill lights the blue touchpaper..

[Prospero]

Toby Young and Burchill were, of course, co-workers at a short lived magazine called, if I remember rightly, The New Review along with her brief gay partner Charlotte Raven. Young is and always has been another self publicist.

And I'm sorry - but it's not only the Right Wing who can be sexist, racist, transphobic and homophobic. Plenty of unreconstructed fools on the Left too.

[Stavros]

An additional, almost depressing thought is that journalists like Julie Burchill, Suzanne Moore, Polly Toynbee, Simon Heffer, Richard Littlejohn and Joan Smith probably get £100,000 a year -possibly even more- for their 'work', which after all, is just their opinion; its not like they have engaged in absorbing research or travelled a thousand miles to interview people in trying conditions before they write their stuff. You would think in the internet age, the blog has made such comment pieces in newspapers redundant, why should I read Polly Toynbee or Julie Burchill at all? If there is an answer maybe is it because anonymous members of the public know they will be read by more people in the comments section of a newspaper than a blog? Yet most of the comments seem to be made by the same hard core of people who promote their pet gripes...I actually find Hungangels has a more diverse and entertaining range of opinion than these comments on articles....

[broncofan]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/br...ims-oppression

Below are a couple of excerpts from the story I found interesting. I'm not sure if it provides a reason Burchill wrote the story she did but some good ideas anyhow.

Edit: just to clarify this is not just a science article but actually addresses Burchill's article and the response to it.


Could it be the Just World Hypothesis? This dates back to research by Melvin Lerner which showed that subjects asked to evaluate someone undergoing painful electric shocks (they were fake, don't worry) tended to rate the victim far less favourably if they were told their suffering would continue. If they were told they'd be rewarded in the end, people rated the victim far more favourably. The worse the victim apparently suffered, the worse the subject's opinion of them was.
What's going on there? The Just World Hypothesis states that people have an inherent belief that the world is fair and just and that people's actions and behaviour is eventually met with the appropriate consequences, i.e. "you get what you deserve." When faced with evidence that suggests that this is bollocks, most people's first response is to rationalise it in a way that allows the illusion to continue. The most obvious example of this is victim blaming.