Am sure you know, but in a nutshell-real debate and discourse is being lost, and it might not seem massively important when we are in a pandemic, and with homelessness at an all-time high, and people struggling in a myriad of ways-but it is important.
Suzanne Moore left for a variety of reasons, I think the full page obituary given over to Peter Sutcliffe in the paper she writes for was the final straw-considering all the women he murdered who people don't really remember the names of.
In the last few years she has been harassed, sent death threats, (as have her children), rape threats, had to get the police involved, simply because she stated reasonable opinions-in her....opinion pieces. She had been at The Guardian for 25 years, I didn't agree with all of her pieces-but I always read her-because she has an interesting sensibility, a a mixture of compassion and constructive anger, and maybe I relate. Disagreement isn't tantamount to discrimination, and we need to be able to ask questions, and apply rigour to various subjects, otherwise I am not sure where we are at.
It might not surprise anyone after reading the preceding three paragraphs-but I really miss people like Christopher Hitchens from the world, he would be seen as "problematic" no doubt, and various people would have surely tried to "cancel" him (what a ridiculous, narcissistic world we live in), but as he wrote-
"If someone tells me that I've hurt their feelings, I say, 'I'm still waiting to hear what your point is.' In this country, I've been told, 'That's offensive' as if those two words constitute an argument or a comment. Not to me they don't."
I don't like the period we are living in-and I come from a place where I respect everyone's human rights. It's sad that I even had to write down that caveat-but I have written it on this forum before, and guess I will again-it is the most misogynistic period I have ever lived through, coming up to four decades on this planet, and it hasn't exactly been a cake walk up to this point. Something strange is happening, and I am still trying to work the roots of it out....that's a long winded way of me saying that I will miss Suzanne Moore's work from The Guardian- papers of record should have divergent opinions, otherwise we are in an echo chamber. If we stop asking questions-where are we
What debate though? Maybe I disagree with the idea of "constructive anger" because I don't know what she has done that is constructive. She's being writing for 30 odd years though and I recognise that i've only been aware of her for about 10.
As I was saying earlier, I'll miss Dawn Foster's work more, another person quietly let go by what considers itself to be the paper of record for having the wrong opinion, but then I don't think the Guardian is especially good. Most of the writers, female or male, I really respect are rarely printed in the Guardian. I dunno, opinion pages are a bit of a bore at the best of times imho, people churning out the same stuff for 20 years.