So for those of you who don't know, Liam Neeson said in an interview that in the past when his friend had been raped by a black man he went round pubs for a few weeks afterwards looking to kill another black guy as revenge. This was after asking what race the attacker from his friend, and he also referred to the man as a "black bastard". He went onto say, "It was horrible, horrible, when I think back, that I did that," and he was "ashamed" and "It’s awful. But I did learn a lesson from it, when I eventually thought, ‘What the fuck are you doing,’ you know?" It's attracted a backlash, particularly because Neeson asked about the guy's race when talking to his friend about the attacker - with some likening him to a white supremacist. I'm pretty annoyed about the response to be honest. It takes a lot of balls to say you did something to admit to something incredibly wrong unsolicited from your past, especially with a view of others being able to learn from it and you taking a reputational hit. Yet people who supposedly would want to encourage more debate on the issue instead are the ones putting a target on his back and saying he's what is wrong with society, despite Neeson having learnt from his mistakes. I just don't understand what people are looking for these days. You have Liam Neeson, taking ownership of a mistake so people can learn for it - "He's a racist!" Then you have people like James Gunn or Kevin Hart who forgot about objectionable tweets they made in the past - "They should have come clean way before now!" Maybe we're moving to a golden age where everyone has so-called woke sensibilities and skeletons in your closet will be a thing of the past, but that doesn't seem near in sight to me so you would think people would realise that other people aren't infallible all the time. I guess I'm finding the intolerance of a lot of these tolerance preaching people pretty alarming.
Ugh, yeah, that's pretty bad. As an example of the backlash, it seems Lily Allen not only thinks he's racist, but she also doesn't believe that his story is true. I mean... what?
It's madness, I don't understand what people are driving for any more. Isn't the best way to learn something is wrong to either do it yourself or have people paint an example of what a mistake it was? Realistically NI isn't known for its tolerance, I'd be more surprised if somewhere growing up there at that time wasn't in some way touched by racism (either perpetrated by themselves, or very much around) to be honest.
One of the latest lessons from American politics: think twice about your choice of Halloween costume 34 years ago, or the outrage machine will end you.
