DAVID THOMPSON: If You Notice Our Dishonesty, We Will Punish You.
I paraphrase, of course. Though not, I think, wildly:
A man in Switzerland is facing 10 days in prison after refusing to pay a fine for an “offensive” social media post. Emanuel Brünisholz, a wind instrument repairman from Burgdorf, was convicted under anti-discrimination laws for making a statement emphasising skeletal evidence of binary sex.
Sorry, still pondering the Swissness of wind instrument repairman.
Brünisholz’s ordeal began in December of 2022 when he responded to a Facebook post by Swiss National Council member Andreas Glarner. In his comment, Brünisholz wrote: “If you dig up LGBTQI people after 200 years, you’ll only find men and women based on their skeletons. Everything else is a mental illness promoted through the curriculum.”
Well, he’s not wrong. We could, I suppose, list things like pelvis shape, skull shape, bone density, Q-angles and whatnot, and we could mention the very high accuracy of sex determination via forensic examinations based on such variables, but it all seems rather obvious. Almost too silly.
Meanwhile, BBC newsreader Fiona Bruce is terrified of a potential trip to Room 101:
It’s such a massive question that it can be answered with a single word: ‘yes.’ What’s truly massive is the chicanery of members of the commentator class who’re too scared of ideologues both inside and outside their workplace to permit that single word to be uttered. https://t.co/Qt3YwpWBx4
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) September 27, 2025
As Wikipedia notes:
The head of BBC history, Robert Seatter, has said George Orwell in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), “reputedly based his notorious Room 101 from the novel “on a room he had worked in whilst at the BBC.”[52]
On 7 November 2017, a statue of Orwell, sculpted by the British sculptor Martin Jennings, was unveiled, outside Broadcasting House. The wall behind the statue is inscribed with the following phrase: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear”. These are words from his proposed preface to Animal Farm and a rallying cry for the idea of free speech in an open society.
Some exceptions apply at the BBC of course, rendering Orwell’s phrase appropriately Orwellian in 21st century Airstrip One. No word yet how they’re preparing in Room 102 for Bruce’s potential arrival: