"Johann has a scrupulous commitment to the kind of thoughts you’d generally hear in the presence of hummus and would never be deliberately dishonest as long as one uses a highly specialised definition of the word that is only shown to Britain’s most important columnists."

"I’d have expected the cars to slow down here to show respect but they sped past, as if people were driving them. Were they driving home from work? Did the police even care? The lane is narrow. I can’t see how someone could have come out of the newsagent with a copy of the Daily Mail without being beeped at and told to get out the way, as I was just because I was standing in the middle of the road."

Mic Wright is typically wise on the subject of Johann Hari’s interviewing of Kenneth Tong:

Johann Hari gets much love on Twitter. He’s the cleverest boy in class as I’ve written before but his grandstanding takedown of self-confessed sociopath and full-time dangerous fuckwit Kenneth Tong isn’t the Ali-knocks-out-Frasier triumph some people are making it out to be. It’s Hari letting a fool hang himself and pulling the quotes together effectively.

However, I think he’s giving Hari too much credit, and overstating Tong’s mentality.

Needless to say, Kenneth Tong is an idiot, but to say he’s either dangerous or mentally ill is to say the same of any number of the people one encounters on the internet or in online gaming or at work on a daily basis. Ground level jaded pragmatists across Twitter identified him as a troll and chose to ignore the fuss pretty early on, leaving the boards clear for the pro-level outraged and backwash trolls to fight it out. For the most part this happened well-clear of my timeline, thankfully, until Hari got involved.

This was a week, after all, where lots of real news was happening. Most of the people I knew outside of Twitter had no clue who Kenneth Tong was. Indeed, I pretty much live my life on there, and only knew about him through other people’s outrage.

I’ll be honest, for all the love Hari gets, and it is plentiful, I will never know whether he is any good as a writer. His reflected views are too noisily aggrieved, and his persona too smug, self-righteous and entitled to get past, and from what I’ve seen his opinions and insights aren’t really enlightening or imaginative enough to be worth such a high price of entry. For sure, he is often on the right side, but I fail to see why we need someone who does little more than validate opinions we probably already had, when at the same time they drag down the general tone of discourse.

My first encounter with his persona was in the video of him bellowing at Richard Littlejohn, while an indentured BNP member looked on sheepishly, which was sold to me as heroic. I didn’t find it heroic. Did we need someone to point out to us that a member of the BNP or Littlejohn are wrong-headed, especially if in the process they make those two not-quite-upstanding citizens actually look rational and considered by comparison?

No, what Hari did then was play to his audience. He isn’t interested in educating or enlightening people who disagree with him, so much as he is in being pet-validator to the worst instincts of the liberal and outraged. Worse, in the process he makes it harder for those of us who have to suffer life in the real world. Who can’t choose our colleagues, or lampoon the intolerance of our families and oldest friends for profit. Who have to deal with patience and reasoned language with the people who actually watch Littlejohn, and who now have a cartoonish stereotype of shrill, impotent liberalism that they can use to tone us out.

And the Tong interview smells to me of being more of the same. I’ll level with you, I haven’t read it, and when I tried to I found that my foreknowledge of it made me too annoyed to start. Because I heard about it the day before on Twitter, in a sequence of smug teaser tweets from Hari himself, coming in on the heels of Tong’s confession - which Hari then insisted was down to him and false - that it was a hoax.

It was hard, as one of the people who doesn’t come to Hari from a stance of admiration, not to see that as a little backward. A self-appointed journalist promoting an upcoming article in such a way, before it was available, didn’t seem like something usual enough to be taken at face value. It seems like a pretty transparent case of Tong’s statement forcing Hari to do something to put himself back in the middle of the story, rather than Tong being forced to break cover because of Hari’s imminent interview.

Nobody covered themselves in glory, here, and I admit I resent the notion that Hari might have ended up with some anyway. His self-promoting approach to this story, and the response of the red-faced who lauded him, grateful to him for providing a way to spare their blushes, is too familiar to moments of conservative outrage in our recent past, where a joke or statement or image has proven so foul and offensive and necessary of censure to The Mail et al that they can’t restrain themselves from sharing it with as many paying punters as possible.

Tong’s statements were execrable, and idiotic, and only as dangerous as they were widespread. Like one of those virus warning emails that makes you delete vital files off your computer, people’s desire to help overcame their ability to apply critical reasoning to the situation, and instead of minimising the potential impact, this exacerbated it. That so many people made this particular error in judgement actually says something pretty nice about them, but the same can’t be applied to Hari’s attempt to morally capitalise on it. Being right every now and then doesn’t stop one being an asshole, and when someone needs such a fractious culture to fuel their career in this way, they can’t reliably be expected to have our best interests at heart.

Johann Hari Interviews Thom Yorke

tomdavenport:

“I’m a creep,” Thom York tells me as he sips tea fresh from the pot, staring vacantly though a misty window. “I’m a weirdo.” He confirms the statement later when he picks something from his ear and eats it, but first he shakes himself from the distraction.

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