Post-match reflections on Webberley

What I learned from my and other people’s appearances with the owner of GenderGP

I was surprised by just how unpleasant I found it being in the same room as Helen Webberley. As I said last week, when I was preparing for a live debate with her on Times Radio, I loathe her. But I didn’t realise how visceral that loathing was, or exactly what I would find so distasteful about her, until we were sitting together in the studio.

If you haven’t already seen it — and if your blood pressure can take it — it’s here.

I had wondered whether Webberley could possibly believe the nonsense she talks — whether, in other words, she is deluded, stupid or saying things she knows not to be true. What I have concluded after the event (an hour of my life I won’t get back) is that none of these properly describe her. What she is is a bullshitter, in the sense proposed by American philosopher Harry Frankfurt, in his book “On Bullshit”, published in 2005.

What distinguishes liars from bullshitters, Frankfurt said, was that liars knowingly seek to convince others of a falsehood, whereas bullshitters don’t care and may not even know whether what they say is true or false. The bullshitter’s speech is more profoundly instrumental — and cynical — than the speech of the liar, who seeks to convince you of the truth of a falsehood. That speech isn’t intended to have any relationship with the truth, either positive or negative. Facts are neither here nor there.