Mark – That’s unfair. I in fact said some nice things about Irwin, which automatically makes the Hitchens comparison as inapt as my comparison of Irwin to the Grizzly Man. “Great” isn’t a word I would use for the man, but as I said he was a decent man who made a real contribution. If I’d given him the Mother Theresa treatment, Hitchens style, I would have called him a force for evil or some such.
I agree there are too many forced apologies in this country, but that has more to do with the identity politics grievance industry, an area where we also surely agree.
Where we disagree is on Michael Jackson. The upshot of your position seems to be, so long as you don’t bugger kids behind closed doors, you should get a free pass at dangling them from public balconies.