Lawrence Fox and the outrage farm

By Daviemoo

Social media is meant to invoke outrage. It feeds on it. Remember when social media first started- sure there would be the odd spat. Now, it caters to it.
Sites like twitter, apps like TikTok, they fuel themselves on controversy- because where there is outrage, there is money… and that’s something that people like Lawrence Fox, osmium dense though he may be, have realised.

Lets get this out of the way first: Fox and all his hangers on like Corcoran, like Grimes and Hartley-Brewer, are all stupid.
All of them are nonsense slinging rage monkeys, screeching out into a world to provoke a reaction, hoping to piss off the world 1/100th as much as they are permanently.
I imagine Fox went to bed last night laughing at the fact he annoyed so many people on a social media app.
“Good”, I bet he thought to himself as he curled up alone in his bed, staring at the dent no sane woman has filled in years. This type of bottom level clickbait farming is literally all he has to his name. If we didn’t know the man was a seething cunt, we wouldn’t know who he is- and he prefers the eye rolling frustration to complete indifference. To quote an excellent TV show- what a sad little life, Jane.

Who is Lawrence Fox without this? What does he stand for? “Free speech”- ok, but what does that even mean? I could also sit there calling people I don’t like paedophiles all day and being taken to court over it, where some shadowy overlord of incel behaviour will be my patron. I don’t, because I’m capable of rational discourse- so the question for Fox and… “friends” is, is he incapable of rational discourse, or is he just that much of a wet lettuce in semi-human form that if someone says “oh don’t say the word moist, I hate it” his veins begin popping up in some primal self defence as he screams the words “MOIST” and “SNOWFLAKE” alternately with more and more tears building in the corners of his rheumy little eyes.

But when it comes to his actions and the actions of his fellow verified incels, they behave this way because they have tapped into the pulse of social media in a way the rest of us may know about, but don’t touch on- not because we can’t, not because we’re unaware of it. Because we’re capable of a deeper nuance in conversation than slinging around hate slurs- because we understand that just because you can be a repugnant prick doesn’t mean you should.
Fox et al are all “free speech” enthusiasts, arguing vociferously for the right to say and do ANYTHING! Anything is off the table, nobody should be able to censor you or your speech, you should be free to say whatever you want.
Dedicated scholars (aka actually intelligent people) would calmly point out that some types of speech are heavily monitored as they are a precursor to actual violence: in the last two weeks in America, two separate anti gay preachers have stood proud at televised podiums and called for the mass shooting of gay people. This weekend, just as Roe V Wade was repealed – a maniac entered a gay bar in Oslo and shot several people to death.
Cause, meet effect- I believe you two are heavily acquainted.

But we know that people like these anger pushing rage monkeys don’t care about that. They just want to feed social media.

It’s not even the point that certain types of speech should be criminalised -we’ve all heard the hot takes of people being arrested or given punitive sentences for posting lyrics to songs people find offensive and I’m not here arguing about that. Those stories, those articles- all feed into the clickbait outrage machine these one trick ponies have mastered. No, it’s not about whether these types of speech should be criminalised or even punished- it’s about the fact that as human beings, capable of rational speech, it’s unbecoming to use them…

I could grunt like primal man. I could scream slurs at a nursing home, and I could yell all the epithets I want to in the street until I was led away for fear of being unbalanced. I don’t do those things- not because I cant, I very much can. It’s because I’m not a fucking loser…

If you can’t have rational discourse without using slurs, if you can’t talk to someone and not immediately sink to saying things you know will provoke and piss them off you aren’t a big brave freedom fighter in the guerrilla war against speech. You’re one of two things, or possibly both:
The first option is that you’re too dense to realise that what you’re saying is rude. This is the type of person like the taxi driver who will jeer at an effeminate man then be surprised when you tell him to shut the fuck up, acting like you did the wrong.
The second option is that you are desperately unhappy, as the collection of geese this article is prompted by are, and simply have to propagate that misery in others.

Perhaps if Fox knew how to behave around people he would still be married. Perhaps if he was more interested in raising his children than provoking anger online he wouldn’t be so hated. But he doesn’t care. This will suit him. And social media allows it.

Oh yes, he shared the imagery of a progress pride swastika yesterday and now his account, as twitter openly professes, is “temporarily locked”. He’s already posted his distain, crying about how “you can call the Union Jack a symbol of fascism but you can’t criticise the holy flags”. Ah yes, free speech until it’s speech you don’t like then, as always.

And in the background of this little sonata of stupidity, social media feeds. More clicks, more shares, more discussion of the man who will sink to the most flagrantly slackjawed commentary just to get acknowledged- and why? Because more clicks are more engagement. More engagement is more money. More money is good, always good right? Does twitter take this outrage money and donate it to LGBT+ charities who are sorely in need of funding and suffer at the hands of the unmitigated bollocks that people like Fox wank onto the internet? Do they even invest it into making their platform better, using algorithms to detect and censor swastika or tweets that could provoke violence against marginalised communities? Well, no but you can be damn sure that any of the upper management have nice cars and big houses.

Social media has fastened its lips around the collective flaccid peni of wasters like Fox etc and is happily slurping up the givings as they sit back in immunity knowing that they’re almost impossible to dislodge because sites like twitter or Tiktok or Facebook or whatever other tepid social media we use are absolutely delighted when a new cunt-in-chief pops up to start tweeting the usual transparent bollocks like “LGBT+ people are bad and this is my freedom of speech”.
LGBT+ people don’t care about your personal opinion- we care that this is step one on the very short ladder to “LGBT+ people should be exterminated with prejudice” and people like you are happy to bend down on all fours to let more extreme people capitalise on your incel upsets to gain ground.
As for freedom of speech- you’re free to walk around calling people like me fags and shirt-lifters, back scratchers and queers. But two things to always bear in mind. If you use language that identifies you as a threat you’ll be treated as one and you shouldn’t be surprised if you call the wrong guy the F slur one day and end up wearing your teeth in a purse around your neck.
But the most important point of all is- you can say those things. But if, in a world as big, broad and varied as this, you sink to the most gormless commentary you can muster just because you should be able to you’re lacking in the very most basic parts of human development when it comes to interaction. And that is why people like Lawrence Fox sleep in a large bed, alone, tweeting at strangers all night.