The Indelicate Mr Fry

As always, context helps.http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/stephen-fry-speaks-about-erosion-of-free-speech-on-student-campuses_uk_570bb53de4b07a35187c5a96

Talk about destroying one's own argument; utterly clumsy and somewhat offensive wording that leaves his original point lost while everyone gasps at his sudden outburst of insensitivity.

Because there was a good point in there somewhere; the over-enthusiastic shielding that becomes censorship lest we find ourselves facing ideas/memories/possibilities/perceptions that make us unhappy.

If we seek to live in a perpetual comfort zone of concepts, all we do is remove words,  a worrying precedent to set. What problem is resolved by having neither vocabulary to define it, nor means with which to deal with it?

Survivors are not trying to hijack the world's care into a state of permanent nannying. Trigger warnings are  given in order not to shut away or close down the conversation/ book/ image/concept. You get the warning, you get involved at your own risk. How is this bad?

I think he conflated a number of issues here, and the flippancy of his language really didn't help. Shot himself in the foot well and truly, the silly beggar.

A Message From The Goblin King

Here is the real secret the Goblin King keeps.

Every story likes a heroine to give up her strangeness; to choose the way everyone else chooses, a family, a spouse, a bank balance or just to belong. But Sarah never forgot the Goblin King, any more than Wendy forgot Never Never Land, or Red Riding Hood the Company of Wolves. And they all tried, by time ticked on the nursery clock, by the chimes of Big Ben, by the rings of felled trees in the forest.

In the end, the ordinary kills more surely than any magic. This is why the cruellest fairy stories recommend it